Mike Isaac

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Twitter Suffers Brief Link Service Outage

Twitter looked to be experiencing technical problems on Thursday morning, as users complained of not being able to access URLs and links tweeted through the microblogging service.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the company’s status blog had not been updated as of 7:04 am PT. Multiple reports of the outage circulated widely, however — via Twitter.

Twitter seems to have temporarily remedied the outage by swapping out its own link-shortening service — which looks to be the problem here — with bit.ly, another link-shortening service. Links accessed through the bit.ly shortener via Twitter were indeed accessible.

It’s obviously a pain for users wanting to access links via the service, which remains one of the most popular ways to discover news and websites through viral circulation and distribution. But it’s likely more of a pain for publishers and news media outlets (like ours, for example) looking to push out stories using the service.

It’s also an unfortunate reminder of the “fail whale” days of yore, when Twitter’s service was far less reliable and experienced downtime often.

The good news: No more fail whale. Now we’ve got a robot monkey instead.

Update 7:34 am PT: And we’re back! Twitter issued a statement via its engineering status blog, saying the issue has been resolved. Carry on.

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