Something is technically wrong.

Thanks for noticing - we’re going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.

That’s what I see when I go to Twitter.com now, and often for the last few hours.

That is, when I’m not seeing the message:
Oops! This link appears to be broken.

That’s a Chrome message, though.  Curious whether it was a browser issue, I tried Internet Explorer, and got this message:
Cannot find “http://www.twitter.com/” and
DNS Error - Server cannot be found.

It’s enough to make me want to log in to IM and ask, “Is The Twitter broken?”  I did, too.I would have Tweeted the question to my tweeps, but it’s like the old George Carlin joke, “Honk if your horn is broken.”  In this case it’s, “Tweet if Twitter is broken.”

Icons
I’m trying to figure out the different icons on the Twitter error screen.

Here’s a miniature version of it.

One might assume the icons would represent something so let’s look at them one at a time.

The Bird
The bird is the easiest one to figure out.  This is Twitter, after all, and we expect to see birds.  Chirp, chirp.

Notice the round shadow, apparently his feathers cast no shadow.

The Robot
Next is this robot guy.

I can guess he’s the fix-it guy and is going to make things better.

Honestly, I don’t find this little guy all that inspiring.  What do you think? 

The Robot Hand
This is a big reason The Robot is not very inspiring.  His hand seems to be missing in the picture above.

Fortunately, we have found the hand.  Maybe that’s why Twitter is broken.

The Clouds
I’m guessing the clouds are here to represent the sky, so the bird can have something to fly in, when he’s ready to fly.

When I go to status.twitter.com, I find that they apparently are having some issues:
Unscheduled downtime
41 minutes ago
We are investigating the problem and will update status shortly.
Update: We have found the problem and are working to correct.
Update: We have corrected a fatal software error. The site is back up.

Although it says it’s back up, I can only get on intermittently.  At least there’s no white whale, I am calling in Ishmael for the next time I see it…

--- Update 30 minutes later ---

Ahhhhh, there’s the whale!

Call out Ishmael!

Twitter is over capacity.
Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.

Let’s see this become a Trending Topic!