Hide and seek. Did I scare you?

Earlier this week, Twitter went down. It went down hard. It was scary. I know because I was there. I now officially have the PTSD. At last, I’m finally somebody.

The duration of the outage was about 45 minutes. That’s approximately twice the amount of time Apollo 13 spent out of radio contact when it was behind the moon. I just got a double dose of what it must have felt like to be in Mission Control. And I’m a non-smoker!

It was the longest outage since Twitter’s IPO and the second crash in the last nine days.

The outage was described in the strongest possible terms as the “longest outage since the IPO.” What those two things have to do with each other I have absolutely no idea.

Some in the media took the opportunity to write quippish jokes about the mayhem. (Hint: It was too soon.) Jokes, I must say, that practically wrote themselves.

• “Twitter Suffers Outage During Biz Stone’s Panel at SXSW” – I don’t know what a “Biz Stone” is but I bet it was pissed. Source: WSJ.
• “Twitter Outage Takes Site Down for 45 Minutes, Users Stranded” – I bet a lot of them were forced to hitchhike. Source: Newsmax.com.
• “Twitter goes down, chaos and productivity ensue” – What the fuck are you implying? Source: Washington Post.
• “‘We Experienced Unexpected Complications’: The Language Of Twitter Outages” – Hey, that’s the hip new lingo. Source: Lifehacker Australia.
• “Twitter Goes Down: Something is Technically Wrong” – You have a firm grasp of the obvious. Souce: The Next Web.
• “Twitter Briefly Goes Down, Silencing Millions Of Horrible, Unnecessary Twitter Jokes” – That hurts, that really hurts. Source: Huffington Post.

Again, as your intrepid embedded reporter, I was there on the front lines. What follows are my eyewitness firsthand accounts of the action as it unfolded.
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