It’s been said many times before, but when sites like Facebook or Twitter become unavailable for one reason or another, workplace productivity improves – I mean really, people have time to work.

Today, I’ve had a twitter outage for around 2 hours, with both the Website and the API (interface to applications like TweetDeck) being down.

Could be localised, but I doubt it.

We will soon see what the word is, either overuse, or some sort of denial of service attack.

Interesting mainly because when you realise how much some companies and individuals are investing in terms of time and money into using these services, their reliability becomes critical.

So, have you experienced an outage today? Let me know!

UPDATE: 3.40pm, outage continues, but is improving.

I note Beat Week reports:

“Twitter has announced that the reason for this evening’s consistent “over capacity” errors and downtime are a result of the service’s own doing, as an attempt to “enhance” the timeline cache didn’t go as planned. The social network says that its engineers are working on the issue, and that there’s currently no ETA for a fix. This evening’s multi-hour surfacing of the fail whale represents one of the most serious outages that Twitter has faced in what so far largely been a bug-free 2010, with the notable exception of the hack earlier this year which temporarily saw users able to force each other into following them back. This time around the only collateral damage appears to be in the form of downtime.”