Twitter sets off jitters as site goes down

The wildly popular Twitter website went offline briefly for many users Thursday, prompting a flurry of complaints on rival sites. "Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter," a company statement said. "Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue." Around an hour later, Twitter said: "The issue has been resolved and all services are currently operational." But that did not stop some panicked users from launching complaints during the outage. "Twitters broke, my life has no meaning anymore," one user wrote on the social media website Tumblr. Another wrote, "OMG TWITTER BROKE. I feel so alone right now." After the outage appeared over, users tweeted sighs of relief: "Did anybody else go through all five stages of grief while Twitter was down?" one tweet asked. "My boss shut down Twitter because he wanted me to get back to work. Feel free to kill him if you want," another tweet said. On Facebook, a member wrote: "Be honest. Did you spend most of Twitter being down desperately trying to tweet about Twitter being down?" Twitter, which allows its members to post brief comments, links or pictures, claims to have more than 140 million active users, with the largest number being in the United States. A recent survey found one in seven Americans who go online use Twitter and eight percent do so every day.