Twitter goes down — and there’s no place now for the Internet to freak out

Uh-oh, it looks like there’s trouble in the Twitter land.

This morning, the service went down, initially without explanation and later “for maintenance.” Features like Twitter cards were still having trouble at 11:41 a.m. Pacific. The outage also affected sites and services that hook in to the social network.

Update: Twitter’s problems cleared up by 11:47 AM Pacific, according to the company’s status update at 12:12 PM Pacific. Twitter explained that during a planned deployment of one of its services, it “experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01 AM.” It then rolled back the deployment as soon as it spotted the issue to stabilize its service. A complete update is available on Twitter’s status blog. During the outage, #WhileTwitterWasDown was trending among the folks who could access the service.

We first noticed at around 11 a.m. Pacific that Twitter was having some problems, with services using the Twitter API unable to access data from the 140-character real-time blurb service.

HootSuite, WordPress, and other services couldn’t get through the Twitter gates. Some people were also unable to log in.

Twitter’s developer blog confirmed a service disruption with “friends,” “statuses/home_timeline,” and “stream.” Particularly, the blog is showing sub-100 performance levels in the U.S., China, and Brazil, among other regions.

The company’s status blog said that it was looking into the user-reported issues. We’ve reached out to Twitter and will update with more information when we hear back or new developments emerge.