Twitter Fail Whale ResurfacesTwitter Fail Whale Resurfaces

In a replay of Wednesday's outages and slowdowns, Twitter Thursday again suffered elevated errors and availability delays.

At 6:39 AM PDT Wednesday, teams responded to incidents of timelines that sporadically backed up and recovered, as well as elevated errors, Twitter reported. According to Twitter, the site is experiencing problems in areas such as: account/verify credentials; direct messages; favorites; lists, and users/show. There is a disruption in Twitter's lists service across many regions around the world, according to the site.

On Wednesday, Twitter blamed a networking equipment error for problems that prevented users from accessing the popular microblogging site throughout much of Wednesday. There is, as yet, no word regarding the cause of Thursday's problems.

"We are experiencing site availability issues -- additional latency and errors -- this morning," Twitter wrote Wednesday on its site. "We're working to address these issues."

At 9:07 PDT, Twitter notified users they may notice latency and errors, and promised the company was working to fix the problem. Less than 30 minutes later, Twitter turned off features such as Twitter search, RSS feeds, photo uploads and HoverCards.

At 9:57 PDT, Twitter told users their timelines were now current but various other features remained disabled. About half an hour later, Twitter re-enabled all features and said latency and error rates were quickly recovering.

By about 12:30 PDT, Twitter publicly identified the problem as a networking equipment error.

" This networking error prevented us from serving at full capacity," the company wrote.

But at 2:25 PDT, Twitter re-encountered a similar issue.

" We’re experiencing a recurrence of this morning’s networking issue. We’re investigating," Twitter said.

In May, users posted 1.99 billion tweets, according to Pingdom. Account-holders wrote 64 million tweets per day or 2.7 million tweets per hour and 44,481 tweets per minute.

Before Wednesday's difficulties Twitter had an uptime of 99.88% in May 2010, according to Pingdom's uptime monitoring service. After yesterday, Twitter has a 99.16% uptime rate for June 2010 compared with a 99.96% uptime rate in June 2009, Pingdom found. However, only 44.5 million people used Twitter in June 2009, said comScore in August 2009.