Picture This: Twitter throws a fit

Just when you thought that fail whales were a thing of the past, Twitter decides to go down in spectacular fashion. This afternoon, visitors to the site weren't even greeted with fail whales. Instead, they were shown a production logon box for employees. Entering user logon information generated a 401 "authorization required" error. Naturally, there was only one place to go to verify the outage: FriendFeed, which showed a group of Twitter-deprived users, including one who called on everyone to mass-migrate to FriendFeed.

Update: Twitter appears to be back online as of 4:24 pm (Eastern).

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• Picture This: FriendFeed sees its first Twitteresque failure