Microsoft and Google Court Twitter as Service Suffers Outage
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Microsoft and Google Court Twitter as Service Suffers Outage: It couldn't have happened at a worse time. Microblogging service Twitter suffered an outage Thursday, just as it reportedly was negotiating a licensing deal with either Google or Microsoft. The up-and-down day for Twitter mirrors the service's bigger struggles as it grapples with technical SNAFUs, a business model, and its blockbuster success.

For much of Thursday, users could post tweets to their own streams, but updates from their followers were scarce at best. After admitting to a totally unspecified "unplanned site outage" late Wednesday, Twitter waited until almost 2 p.m. ET Thursday to elaborate on the problem. It explained in vague terms that "timelines remain stale for users." It wasn't until sites such as TechCrunch started speculating that Twitter had fallen victim to a DDOS attack that Twitter posted an official statement explaining: "The problems this morning were caused by a bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services that powers Twitter."

At precisely 3:54 p.m. on Thursday, Twitter was reporting that "Most users are seeing freshly updated timelines. However, due to the previous problems, users of our SMS service may experience some missing tweets." As of about 10 p.m. ET on Thursday, Twitter hadn't updated its status any further. A search of Twitter.com under the "outage" search term on Thursday night yielded no new reports of user issues.

 

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With Google and Microsoft both looking to ink a deal with Twitter for its real-time data, the microblogging company could have finally found a way to turn tweets into dollars.

At the same time, the titans of tech may have found a way to boost their real-time search efforts in the midst of their raging search war.

The intense rivals are in separate talks with the new online darling Twitter to set up their own data-mining deals , says a report from The Wall Street Journal 's AllThingsD Web site. The "advanced talks" are said to be over licensing deals that would allow them to integrate real-time Twitter feeds with their search engines, Google's search and Microsoft's Bing.

None of the three companies would respond to requests for information about the reported negotiations.