Were you trying to tweet about holiday travels or last minute shopping on Wednesday, but having trouble accessing your feed? You might have experienced an outage, as confirmed by Twitter later in the afternoon.

      "Twitter is currently down for some users," said a post on the Twitter Status site. "We are aware of the problem and working on it."

      The original status was posted at around 3:15 Eastern time, then updated shortly after to say that the problem had been fixed.

      Twitter experienced some issues last week after Gawker's commenter database was hacked. Though it was first rumored to be a worm, it was actually a a spam attack that spread through Twitter via tweets that discussed the "acai berry." Twitter warned users to change their passwords immediately.

      "Current attack appears to be due to the Gawker compromise," Twitter tweeted that morning. "In other words: the 'acai berry' spam attack looks to be connected w/ the Gawker hack rather than a worm."

      Launched in July 2006, Twitter now has more than 175 million registered users. But most of its growth was achieved over the past two years.  According to a recent study from social media analytics company Sysomos, 95 percent of Twitter handles have been created since January 2009.

      Prior to that time, Twitter's growth had been relatively steady, albeit slow.

      Sysomos also said that Twitter users have gotten more comfortable with sharing personal information since 2009. In the past two years, the number of users that have published a bio on the micro-blogging site has surged from 31 percent to 69 percent.

      Despite these findings, Pew recently said that only 8 percent of Web users in the U.S. are on Twitter.

      As of publication time, Twitter appears to be up and running.

Source from PCMag