Twitter fails for over an hour

Twitter, the social networking and micro-blogging service, crashed Wednesday leaving many around the world without a valued source of information.The outage occurred at around 11:40 GMT. The timing shortly after a 6.1 magnitude aftershock in Haiti caused some to suggest that the vast number of tweets hitting the system had simply overloaded the network. Robin Wauters from Techcrunch, writing on the Washington Post website, suggested it may have had something to do with Bill Gates having joined the Twitterati today. Some applications were displaying the message "Twitter appears to be down for maintenance". Meanwhile the Twitter site itself displayed the message "Twitter is over capacity". Whatever the reason, the service was still offline more than an hour later at 12:40 GMT.

tvnewswatch, Beijing, China