Twitter decides to test out downtime ahead of planned downtime

Users of the micro-messaging service Twitter got a warning message earlier today on the main site that the service would be down for a scheduled two hour maintenance around midnight Pacific time. I see this warning message as a good thing — it’s certainly better than being down with absolutely no explanation (as routinely happens with the service).

Unfortunately (and perhaps predictably), Twitter has decided to go down in the mid-afternoon. Occasionally it’s working on reload, but mostly not. Sometimes I see that almost all of my replies are missing. Sometimes I see nothing but the service’s error message.

The service’s downtime is almost comically tiresome at this point. “Comically” being the keyword the great video Allen Stern of CenterNetworks made to serenade the service (below).

I would point you to the Summize results for “twitter down”, but if Twitter is down people can’t really tweet about it.

When it is up, you can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha and Chris Morrison. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

update 3:30pm – Twitter appears to be back up for now. Will it make it to midnight? Does anyone have plans for the scheduled maintenance window?