Twitter is broken for an unknown number of its 500-million-strong userbase.

The site's over-capacity Fail Whale is greeting many people who are trying to access the site, while others are finding the service to be extremely slow.

A spokeswoman at the privately-held company confirmed to The Register (by email) that there was indeed an issue with the 140-characters-or-less Tweet machine at time of writing.

Twitter has (we're told) tried to issue a tweet to its users, saying:

We're hearing reports that some users are having intermittent connection problems on http://twitter.com. We're working on it.

With this outage, the economy might get back on its feet, the sun could come out and thirsty workers will be rewarded with free desk beer. Probably. ®