Twitter has been down for about 40 minutes now (since about 6 am California time), and counting. No word on their status blog about the outage at all (Update: they now say “Site is down – We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.”).

Since most of you spend your entire work day screwing around on Twitter (luckily I actually get paid to do this), you may be left wondering what to do now. No worries, we have a list. Meanwhile, I can’t Tweet (TM) that it’s raining here in Palo Alto, or go on a 140 character rage over PG&E shutting off my electricity for no reason at all yesterday, forcing me to come into the office at 4 am this morning.

Twitter declared their scaling problems over in early 2007, well before the serious problems even started. And as much as the Great Twitter Outages of 2007 and 2008 frustrated early adopters (there were so many outages that we just started reporting uptime instead), these outages are much more serious. 45 million people worldwide now rely on Twitter as a communication platform. If they want to be the “Pulse of the Planet,” it’s time to scale.

Of course, even the largest sites still have occasional outages. Yahoo suffered 15 minutes of systemwide downtime yesterday, we’re still trying to get their comment on why that happened.

Update: LiveJournal is also down. Who else?

Update 2: Some commenters are saying Facebook is down too, although it’s up for me and others.

Update 3: Work productivity surges around the world. My electricity is still off.

via TechCrunch