As Twitter Grows, So Does Our Pain When It’s Down

Hyperventilation, dizziness, sudden productivity. These are all symptoms of a distinctly modern suffering – a Twitter blackout.

It happened Thursday, like the universe coming unstitched, at least for some people.

“Then my fiancé told me Facebook was down too. Oh, great, I said. ‘It’s the end of the world.‘“

~Amber Osborne, a.k.a. “@MissDestructo”

Amber Osborne, a.k.a. “@MissDestructo” on Twitter,“ was headed to a photo shoot for a magazine article about – what else—Twitter.

“I started getting all these e-mails from people, and I thought ‘Who still uses e-mail?‘,“ she said. All her friends send messages through Twitter to their followers online. But utterly unplugged, Osborne’s posse of 4,469 followers on Twitter resorted to typing out actual correspondence to her.

It was weird, she said, seeing phrases and details that stretched into whole sentences, well beyond Twitter’s 140-charater message limit. It was too much.

Like millions of Twittterholics across the globe, Osborne had to find other things to do with her hands than tweet.

The cause of this Twitterpocalypse: Diabolical hackers had orchestrated a malicious attack, paralyzing the Tweeting universe around the world, leaving them unable to fire off their vital updates.

No Haiku accolades of John Hughes’s genius.

No catty critiques of last night’s regrettable hookup.

No urgent blurbs from Paula Abdul, MC Hammer or Aston Kutcher.

To be sure, worse has happened.

Entire states have been cut off from the Internet when an errant backhoe digs in the wrong place, severing fiber optic lines. That happened in Florida just a few years ago.

BlackBerry networks have glitched out, sending executive suites and members of Congress into paroxysm.

Twitter itself suffers a horrible track record of breakdowns, making its “Fail Whale” error logo a touchstone of pop-culture miscues.

Twitter, meanwhile, has graduated from being a pet-project among early-adopting techie types and High School girls to a mainstream phenomenon attracting millions of people to the can’t-update-enough mindset.

And this highlights a particular poignancy of Twitter.

The very rapid fire, compact and tart tone of 140-character Tweets made the breakdown all the more painful because tweeting provides such a continually efficient pipeline for every mental vapor.

When one becomes accustomed to tweeting about the latest pancake – at that exact moment – depriving one of that outlet hurts in a hurry.

Confusion reigned for interminable hours as Twitter seemed to work on some iPhone apps (Twitterific), but not on some BlackBerries (UbberTwitter) – or the other way around, depending on – something – no one was really sure.

Self-described “Twitterholic Sandi McKenna had already designated Thursday to downshift from her tweeting and visit her father in his nursing home.

“I’ve been on Twitter a little too much lately,“ she said. “I get sidetracked. Someone says something so interesting and I get distracted. It’s like a 24-hour cocktail party.“

But even bedside with her Dad, news of the outage hurt.

“My OCD kicked in,“ McKenna joked. “Oh my God, Twitter’s down. Now what?“

Then, impossibly, it got worse.

Like a tidal wave suddenly hitting a mountainside, the Twitter nation’s rush of psychic pressure to update simply flooded into another direction: Facebook.

“Then my fiancé told me Facebook was down too,“ Osborne said. “Oh, great, I said. ‘It’s the end of the world.‘“

Hackers had targeted Facebook, too – intermittently shutting off access for millions. Some big blogging platforms seized, too. Hordes gnashed their teeth wondering how to express their suffering about Twitter and Facebook being down—without being able to update their Twitter or Facebook accounts.

For the socially addicted online (and there are more each passing day), it was apocalypse.

Left with no other option, social media addicts turned to other efforts.

Osborne packed her apartment for a move. “I got so much done,“ she said with a thrill. “I put up so much stuff on Craigslist to sell, and got a ton of packing done.“

Tampa author Jackie Silver (@AgingBackwards) coped by giving herself short tasks.

“I worked out for a half-hour, telling myself that it would be fixed by the time I got done,“ she said. “I sweated and got out all my frustrations—and then it wasn’t back up.“

Eventually, the clouds parted and Twitter came back online, but only for some people. For other victims, relief took a day to arrive.

Like victims of a national tragedy, Twitterholics unleashed a torrent of stories about where they were when disaster struck.

Because Twitter fans can statistically track phrases uttered in the Twitter universe, and tag them with a “#“ mark, the psychic trauma was fully quantifiable. By Friday morning, the most popular “trending” phrase on Twitter was “#whentwitterwasdown.“