Twitter Outage Sparks ‘Panic’ and Underscores Social Media User Dependence

On Thursday morning, Twitter went down for approximately one hour.

If the outage had lasted any longer, governments may have been overthrown, anarchy would have reigned, and the zombie apocalypse would have all but certainly begun in earnest.

During that short duration of down time today, given how angry and emotional some users were in response to the outage, one could have easily thought the Mayans were off by a couple of months when they predicted an end to the civilized world in late 2012.

Fortunately, Twitter’s engineers quickly got to the bottom of the glitch and the micro-blogging platform was restored by early afternoon. And just as quickly, all was right with the world again.

As of this writing, it isn’t clear just how widespread the outage was. But it was obviously widespread enough to send the Internet into freak-out mode. Perhaps the headline from CNN put it best: “Twitter crashes hard, Internet freaks out.”

Twitter’s temporary demise sent users to other social networks, including the blogging site Tumblr. As one commenter put it on CNNMoney’s own Tech Tumblr: “I enjoy the fact that when Twitter goes down, my Tumblr explodes. :)”

Without question, the sixty minutes of pure hell that Twitter’s outage caused today illustrated just how passionate about and dependent upon social networking the masses have become.

Let’s hope the next time Twitter goes down, it doesn’t last longer. Or else earth may literally stop spinning.