CNN is reporting the “situation” as breaking news. What happened? A hacker? A massive snafu? Rolling blackouts? In fact, this was planned maintenance. Every site will have some unavoidable, hopefully planned, downtime. While it’s rare for a site the size of Twitter to be down for all users during the middle of the day, apparently Twitter found it necessary today. Such outages are usually announced in advance, as was the case at Twitter today (http://status.twitter.com). As seen in the screen capture below, today’s site-wide outage was publicly announced yesterday. I suppose most users don’t read the Twitter Status page. Maybe a heads-up on the home page would have communicated the issue more effectively.