Twitter has been unavailable for at least an hour; the microblogging service's status blog helpfully reports that the company has no idea what's going on.

Facebook, meanwhile has been spitting out error messages and intermittently cutting off people's inboxes, our staff has noticed.

PC World, which has also noticed Facebook problems, thinks this morning's internet mess might have something to do with Gawker Media's servers being attacked earlier this week. It wouldn't be the first time we've been accused of functioning as a gateway drug to depravity and unproductiveness.

UPDATE: Twitter reports it's fighting a denial of service attack.

So just go ahead and post your tweets and status updates in the thread below. Why not? You'll feel better, and with the messages about your breakfast or need for coffee or whatever out of the way, you might actually be productive, at your actual job.

UPDATE 2: Twitter is back. Commence insipid microblogging!

According to our tipster, who works for one of Sony's Internet service providers, MySpace's security team inadvertently banned Sony employees from accessing its site in the course of going after a spammer:

I just talked to MySpace's head of security and they are lifting the block.

Here's why Sony was blocked. They get their Internet through us. MySpace went after one of our customers for MySpace spamming. We terminated that customer because I hate spammers with a vengence, but then MySpace banned our whole [system]. In essence, MySpace believed we were just a hosting provider and not the actual Internet — i.e. providing transit connectivity where companies go through us to reach other companies.

Oh and it wasn't just Sony... Los Angeles County government along with Orange County government offices use us for transit. So they were also blocked.

We were emailing MySpace for a few days, but they didn't believe we provided anything more than dedicated servers. We believe the only reason MySpace finally unblocked our network was because we sent them a link to your story.

We were scratching our heads as to why MySpace blocked Sony when Sony spends so much money advertising movies and music.

Our tipster speculates: "Revenge for all the crap services that MySpace provided to Sony as a studio? Maybe." There'd be a ha-ha joke about how not being able to log onto MySpace's unusable site is a kindness, except that Hollywood studios, which set up pages for their movies to promote them, actually need to access the site. Here's the memo about the outage:

From: Brian Franke
Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 1:32 PM
To: Interactive
Subject: MySpace.com Update

Folks,

Just wanted to let you know that we are looking into the MySpace.com redirect to Google.com issue.

It appears to be on the MySpace end (unexpectedly), and has been escalated to their network team.

No ETA yet on a resolution.

Please contact me if you have time-sensitive MySpace deliverables, and we can discuss options.

Regards,

Brian

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-

Brian Franke

Executive Director of Technology

Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive

Update: Brian Franke's colleague Nancy Kim, director of digital communications strategy at Sony Pictures Entertainment, sent us this email:

Hi Owen,

Can you please remove this article?

Not sure where you received that information? As Sony is certainly not "banned".

Please feel free to call me if needed.

Thanks!

Nancy

So now Sony has two problems: A ban by MySpace, and a digital communications strategy which seems to involve denying reality.

(Photo by xurble)

Since it runs on fallible computers programmed by fallible humans, Google has gone down before, and it's safe to predict that it will go down again. But today there was an unspecified outage, apparently specific to some Internet service providers, and is already over (though some Twitter users are still re-reporting Google's downtime as breaking news). There have been tens of thousands of tweets about #googlefail but none gave much more information than the Associated Press's hilariously vague lede on this pressing story: "Technical problems at Google are preventing an unknown number of people from using its Internet search engine, e-mail and other services."

Soon enough, we'll be reading Twitter pundits twitterpatedly explaining how this was a crucial watershed moment for the message-broadcasting service. The flood of messages tagged "#googlefail," they'll argue, surely alerted Google and the Internet service providers who carry its traffic to the problem; it would not have been fixed otherwise.

Nonsense. Google's own status dashboard shows the problem was identified at 8:23 a.m. Pacific Time; it was fixed, Google's engineers say, at 9:39 a.m. Yet Twitter and the news-hungry tech blogosphere are going on, and on, and on.

The concept Twitter fans like to advance is that it's a real-time means of diagnosing customer-service issues before they blow up into big problems. What Twitter actually does is inflate problems out of all proportion, as Twitterers noisily tweet about how with it, on it, and over it they all are, repeating each other's messages without adding anything of value. Any Googler trying to search Twitter to diagnose his company's networking problem would go mad long before he extracted useful information.

Who's going to report this outage? No one on Twitter, certainly. They're too busy congratulating themselves for yet another Twictory over reality and common sense.

(Illustration by ivanlanin)

Basically, it breaks down into five types. They are as follows:

The Core
The shrieking, BO-whiffed, bracefaced (did I mention shrieking?) core. We might have maybe once gone to an Idols Live! concert in Worcester, MA once and holy god the shrieking. Hypothetically, our ears might still be ringing. These fans are a no brainer. Tween and early teen girls like to have crushes and feel sweaty little tingles up their spines and they like to weep. Oh do they like to weep. Here you have, twice weekly!, a blaring, bright, bombastic channel for all those curly-cue girly-sue emotions that just store up at school and maybe Ryan brushed by you but maybe it was an accident and oh my god does Brittany Sanders have boobs now? Oh never mind, here's Kris Allen. Ahhhh. Shrieeeeeeeek.

The Haterparade
Basically the Vote for the Worst folks. Reality singing competition versions of lulz-seeking inter-trolls. But the truth is that, beneath the snickering hater, lies a sad Chillable Red-soaked secret: These people still watch American Idol every week and feel some swell of pride whenever their spitefully cast votes seem to have some effect on the outcome. It's that deep abiding nerd love that turns to nerd hate that burns so white hot it becomes nerd love again.

The Ironically Lame
"I just watch for the bad hair." "I just watch because it's so stupid." "I just watch because my boyfriend makes me." These are the lines of the tragically hip, those who tune into American Idol because oh isn't it so silly and homey and mainstream, like having a Miller High Life at Gutter. For an example of this, look no further than the latest, especially useless edition of Diablo Cody's always useless Entertainment Weekly column "Binge Thinking" (yeah, I know). In it we're supposed to think it's hilarious and endearing that she likes American Idol and that she saw something special in dorky, gangly Alex Wagner-Trugman. He was a skinny lad who got voted off in the semifinals and oh ha ha, she liked the little dork and isn't she fun. No.

The Earnest Eeyores
These are the folks who really think and feel about the competition, who really are gunning for Adam Lambert because his performances are really saying something. Oddly enough, Quentin Tarantino might fall into this category. He really, genuinely, sincerely, etc. seems to care about the "artistry" of the evening. Some of these people aren't so annoying, like Cody's EW colleague Michael Slezak, who covers all things Idol exhaustively, unironically, and ably. Sure he said that Lamb Chops' latest made him feel genuine emotion and he should be slapped upside the head for that, but otherwise, he's the tops. No, the Earnest Idol supporters are typically not the most frustrating fans of the show. But they can be! Oh, can they.

The Bewildered
We are the Bewildered. Most likely, they are you. People who, every year, swear to themselves that they will not watch. They will resist the sticky charms and pebble-in-the-shoe annoyances of this heaving, top-heavy bit of reality manipulation. But we can't stay away. There's something so alluring about its methodical nature, its plod plod plod to the end. The way Ryan says the same things, the same way, every season. The character arcs you can follow with a finger, the ups and downs (definitely up this season) of human Slushee Paula. The strange gurgle in the stomach, new this year, when Kara opens her big stupid yap. Is it that we feel we are participating in America? Is it that we just like to hear some decent singing every week? Is it that we lack any other sense of accomplishment in our lives, so finishing a whole season of Idol, start to finish, is what we use to get our sad little fix? Probably all of that. Either way, we're just a little past Passive, but just far enough past it that we may, shameful fingers prodding the keys, vote for one of the singers as the season wears down. Yes, Melinda Doolittle, we voted for you. And yes, Allison. Expect a call.

As they do in our inbox. A tipster offers the following explanation: "Facebook is currently reloading their old format and taking the site down to do so." That strikes us as unlikely; on Twitter, Facebook users report they're having trouble accessing search and photo features, suggesting database problems on the back end of Facebook's systems. Flipping back to the old design would seem to be a relatively simple front-end change.

Not that changing back would be a bad idea. We hear that Facebook's widely loathed redesign, which emphasizes friends' up-to-the-minute status updates at the expense of other features, has hit the site where it hurts: its traffic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has told employees they should ignore feedback from users, may find that data deafening.

According to Tweetscan, an independent website which indexes and searches "tweets," the 140-character updates sent by Twitter devotees, the two were discussing Twitter on their ABC talk show, The View, right before Twitter failed.

The outage is unusually severe: Twitter's website is wholly unavailable, unlike past incidents where Twitter displayed an error message known as the "fail whale" for the whimsical cetacean it displayed. Whatever the cause — overcapacity induced by The View's large audience hitting the site all at once, or an inconveniently coincidental outage — it's an embarrassment for a site which had pledged that prolonged outages were a thing of the past.

The last messages displayed before Twitter went down:

Update: Our long national nightmare is over! Sort of. Twitter.com is available again, but the site is displaying the fail whale:

Welcome to Lulu.com! An online representative will be with you shortly. Your wait time will be approximately 0 minute(s) and 11 seconds. Thank you for waiting.

You are now chatting with 'Chris M'

Your Issue ID for this chat is xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Chris M: Welcome to Lulu.  Please hold while I review your question.

removed@removed.com: I am at this screen:

removed@removed.com: https://www.lulu.com/commerce/index.php?fSubmitCheckout=1

Chris M: xxxxxxxxxxxxx-is this regarding your concern?

removed@removed.com: yes, when I select "standard" or "express", this screen reloads, but does not progress to the next step.

removed@removed.com: i have tried removing my credit card info, as you previously suggested, but this has had no impact on my ability to progress past this screen.

removed@removed.com: have tried on both a mac (firefox 3) and winxp (ie7)

Chris M: I'm sorry about this but this is actually a glitch on our end.

Chris M: We are still working on fixing this one. Sorry about the delay.

removed@removed.com: thank you, what is your eta for completion?

Chris M: I'm sorry but we don't have one yet, hopefully after 2 weeks from the time we had a site release, which was last week.

removed@removed.com: so you're saying we can't order a book today, and maybe not for the rest of the week?

Chris M: Yes, We need to fixed this one first. Sorry to say.

removed@removed.com: is there some other way to place our order then? this is a proof version of a book that we plan to order 500 copies of in time for delivery by christmas. if we can't order the proof, it is exceptionally unlikely we will be able to place the rest of the order with lulu.

removed@removed.com: in order to get this proof in time, we need to order it by today or tomorrow.

Chris M: I'm really sorry about this one. I'll update this ticket but I can guarantee a reply right away, since we have a 3-4 business days wait for responses as this time for site issues.

removed@removed.com: can or can't guarantee

Chris M: *sorry abot the typo, can't*

Chris M: *at this time.

removed@removed.com: If you only support online ordering (and not order by IM or telephone), and you cannot accept online orders, then your business is broken. I will recommend to our team that we will no longer be using lulu for our on-demand printing business. Thank you for your time this morning.

Chris M: I'm terribly sorry about this issue, you can try emailing saleschat@lulu.com or bulkorders@lulu.com and hopefully they can go over your request.

A zero-day patch is a security alert that's been issued for some major, Internet-threatening bug, one that's so serious that they give people zero days of warning. It means the bad guys know about it. It's so bad that it needs to be fixed right away, I get that. But do you think IT departments are staffed for one zero-day patch over another?

Of course not. Your infrastructure doesn't scale, but who cares? And why pay for all that automation? We have people here. Or in Bangalore, or somewhere. But when an operation takes 10 minutes per machine, multiplied by hundreds of servers and thousands of workstations for millions of customers ... well, I'll get complaints about the overtime charges, but my managers already told me they didn't want to pay to configure the automated solution. See? I can't win, even if Arista replaces every Cisco box on the network.

The bright side: This morning, I worried I'd be out of a job by noon. Thanks to Microsoft, I now have another life-or-death upgrade to install. I'll do it this weekend. I may not have a family life, but I have a job.

A feed of your friends' Twitter messages publicly lists all all messages, whether or not they're "protected." (Twitter users can choose to protect their messages so only designated "friends" can see them.)

I decided to test the bug on some folks for whom privacy might be a fresh concern — two ringleaders of the infamous "Camp Cyprus" video, Facebook product manager Dave Morin, and Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Vascellaro. Both participated in a seaside frolic in Cyprus with several other Internet-employed individuals, which has become a symbol of Web 2.0 excess. Vascellaro made her Twitter messages private after she got back from her Cyprus vacation, after rather indiscreetly Twittering several updates about the progress of the video.

Sure enough, Morin's feed of messages from Twitter friends contains a private message broadcasted by Vascellaro only to her designated friends. Fortunately, it's just a notice that she's "in need of Halloween costume ideas," rather than an update about a story she's filing for the paper.

To see anyone else's private, friends-only messages, pick one of the user's friends, and then substitute their user name in this URL:

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/[USERNAME].xml

Here's a question: Will this bug get fixed more quickly, now that it's been shown to involve a Facebook employee and a Wall Street Journal reporter? Twitter what you think, or leave it in the comments.

Sure, blame the sysadmin. What the company is telling customers: It's hired Akamai Technologies to make sure the site stays online. But what we're wondering: Did someone forget to put a cap on the offer, and pull the plug on the website after more people than expected signed up for the $19.28 rate?

• This month, a French newspaper reported Mac Pro desktops might cause cancer.
• The iPhone 3G charger cord is a fire hazard and it's being recalled.
• In 2007, iPod Nanos began bursting into flames.
• Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted MobileMe wasn't ready for launch when Apple began pushing it on customers.
• In 2006, some MacBooks also burst into flames. They also discolored after little use and continue to crack.

(Photo via Ars Technica)