The Twitterverse came to an unexpected halt for more than an hour yesterday, and tweeters around the globe nearly panicked. Twitter apologized for the worldwide outage, and blamed it on a technical glitch—not on overwhelming traffic triggered by the Olympics, as tweeters later speculated, reports CNN. "We are sorry," Twitter's vice president of engineering wrote in a blog post. "Users around the world got zilch from us" until service returned.
The crash was blamed on an "infrastructural double-whammy" when a backup data center failed after the first center crashed. Tweeters complained that they couldn't gripe about the outage on Twitter—and were forced to grumble on Facebook. (More Twitter stories.)