Normally, for these sorts of service outages, the first place we consult is Twitter. After all, the site is the “pulse of the planet” right?

Well, the pulse was lost this morning. Twitter is experiencing a serious outage that’s impacting users of the popular social networking service throughout the world. The Associated Press reports that engineers are “currently working to resolve the issue,” an outage that comes just a day before the London Olympics are to kick off.

Stay tuned, and we’ll update this post as we uncover what’s wrong. Meanwhile, let us know if you are experiencing problems. (I couldn’t even reach the company’s about or status pages to learn what was causing the outage).

Estately co-founder Galen Ward, an active Twitter user, said that he’s been unable to post messages this morning on is account @galenward. But, if he could Tweet, here’s what he told us he’d say:

“Join us for International Downtime Day (IDD) and make people step away from the screen for an hour.”

This marks yet another outage for a cloud-based service, following repeated problems for Amazon Web Services.

UPDATE 9:48 a.m.: I was able to access the status page where this message was posted about an hour ago: “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.”

UPDATE 10:15 a.m.: Twitter is back for me, and appears to be operating normally. The company has yet to update its status page with an explanation on what went wrong.

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