People across much of the planet were having problems accessing
Twitter on Thursday, a day before the 2012 Olympic Games are expected to cause a spike in use of the micro-blogging site. Earlier,
Google Talk services were also hit.
Twitter acknowledged the problem, saying in a statement that its engineers are "currently working to resolve the issue," although it didn't go into any further detail.
Visitors to the site were greeted with the half-formed message: "Twitter is currently down for %(equals) reason %." "We expect to be back in %(equals) deadline %," the site said.
Sluggishness or outages were reported from countries in North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Some users were apparently able to post updates - known as "tweets" - through their phones or third-party applications. Updates about the Olympic torch - which is currently wending its way through central London - were still pouring in, albeit far more slowly than earlier in the day.
The Olympics are expected to bring an unprecedented surge of activity by sports fans on social networking sites such as Twitter.
At the recent European Championship final, users fired off more than 15,000 tweets per second, setting a sports-related record for the site.
Google's chat-messaging service Google Talk had suffered a massive outage across the globe. This had been confirmed by Google after reports of the outage surfaced on social media. But Google Talk services have been partially restored.
Many users reported not being able to see their contacts in the chat list. In some cases, where the contacts were visible, users could not send messages.
Google said it is investigating the issue and will provide an update on when the issue will be resolved, reports said.
(With Agency Inputs)
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