Updated @ 09:31 GMT, January 20: Twitter has blamed the service wobbles—which lasted some eight hours after the initial outage occurred on Tuesday morning, UK time—on "an internal code change." The company added: "We reverted the change, which fixed the issue. Thank you for your patience."

Updated @ 13:50 GMT: Twitter still appears to be sporadically up and down; it comes back up for a few seconds, and then seems to go back down again. It's now been about five hours since the outage first began.

Original story

Twitter has suffered what appears to be a major outage in the past 30 minutes.

The microblogging (is that a term that anyone still uses?) site confirmed that it is indeed struggling to bring the service back online for an unknown number of folk.

At time of writing, Twitter could not be reached via mobile and desktop versions of the service.

Twitter said in a status update that it was having problems on Tuesday morning. It explained, without really explaining anything:

Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution.

Four of the company's five public APIs are also out of action, according to Twitter's developer page.

The service outage also, ironically enough, means that folk can't take to the site to moan about the service outage. But productivity in Blighty is probably surging about now—so there is that.

We'll update this story if Twitter offers up a full explanation of what went wrong.