• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 20, 2010

A visit to Twitter to catch up on news and information early Wednesday morning may have stopped many dead in their tracks with an error message reading: "Something is technically wrong."

After Twitter went down in the early hours of the morning, a note on the Twitter status page blamed the site outage on "extremely high volume of whales." It lasted for about an hour. At about 5:18 a.m. EST the crew posted an update:

"We are recovering from this incident. A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes. This made the site largely inaccessible. No data was lost or compromised during this outage," the twitter team wrote.

The Twitter API crashed, causing thousands of third-party applications and services to fail. Chatter on Twitter suggested that an aftershock in Haiti that prompted another spike in service could have caused the site to go down.

Twitter's last prolonged downtime, which lasted for more than three hours, occurred during the DDoS (denial of service) attack last August.

The attacks promoted the service to increase security. The site going down could indicate that Twitter still isn't ready to become the real-time news source for search engines, such as Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo. The three integrated real-time search into search queries last year.