Twitter site restored

(AP) — People around the world briefly experienced problems accessing Twitter today, a day before the 2012 Olympic Games are expected to cause a spike in use of the micro-blogging site. About three hours after the San Francisco-based company first acknowledged the problem by saying its engineers were “currently working to resolve the issue,” Twitter said in a statement that the “site issue” had been resolved. It did not go into further detail on what caused the glitch — the second time in just over a month that the site has been hit by problems. Visitors to the site had been greeted with a half-formed message saying that “Twitter is currently down.” The fields where a reason for the outage and a deadline for restoring service were apparently meant to go were filled with computer code. Sluggishness or outages were reported for more than an hour in countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Some users were able to post updates through their phones or third-party applications. Tweets about the Olympic torch, which is wending its way through central London, still poured in, albeit far more slowly than earlier in the day. While the site was affected, many self-proclaimed “Twitter refugees” had flooded Facebook with complaints about Twitter. As usual following outages, “WhileTwitterWasDown” was one of the most-talked about topics on Twitter in the United States. Users cracked jokes about their regained productivity as a result of the downtime — or going outside to get some sunshine. Twitter said in March that it has more than 140 million active users and that the service sees 340 million Tweets a day.