Why Was Twitter Down?

O.M.G. Twitter crashed for "most users" Tuesday, and chaos ensued. Seriously, chaos. I mean, when your favorite social media site that gets you through your day and connects you to your favorite people dies temporarily, the only thing to feel is panic and develop abandonment issues, right? Don't fret, friends. It's back up for good... I think. But this was one of the largest outages ever reported on Twitter, and the largest since its public offering in 2013.

Twitter's homepage said the site was "down for maintenance" and said "most users" were having issues. In fact, the Twitter mobile app and Tweet Deck were also down. Twitter does experience small outages from time to time, and reports them on the Status blog.

In its early days, Twitter had frequent crashes, usually illustrated by the “Fail Whale” we all know lovingly. Despite the fact that the San Francisco-based company’s social media service is much more stable these days, even with the crazy number of users and tweets, the company realizes that “service disruptions, outages and other performance problems” will happen at times.

Now that it's back up, fellow tweeters are poking fun at crash.

One NJ.com reporter even joked that there would be no way for the NFL to "conduct free agency" without Twitter and should just call the whole thing off. HA, right.

Behold — a bunch of the funniest tweets from Tuesday's Twitter outage for your viewing pleasure:

Now, what would happen if Twitter ever crashed for good? I don’t think I want to know...

Image: @gdnwhiteboard