Twitter services crash for nearly an hour

SAN FRANCISCO, March 11 (UPI) -- Twitter services on the web and mobile devices crashed for an hour Tuesday afternoon, with Twitter initially saying that the site was down for maintenance.

Early error messages said that Twitter was down for maintenance, although it is highly unlikely Twitter would conduct maintenance activities during the middle of a business day. Many suspected it had something to do with changes made to the Connect tab on the top bar, which has now been renamed Notifications.

By 2:30 p.m. EDT Twitter acknowledged its services were down and sent out a post outlining the real cause for the outage.

"During a planned deploy in one of our core services, we experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01 am. We rolled back the change as soon as we identified the issue and began a controlled recovery to ensure stability of other parts of the service. The site was fully recovered by 11:47 am PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience."

While most users have regained access to Twitter, some users are still having issues accessing the site and certain third-party clients, such as Hootsuite and Twitterfall, are still having trouble accessing the service.

[Twitter]