Twitter Crashes, World Reels

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.)