First: No, it’s not just you. And at first I thought it was just that no one had tweeted for 30 minutes. Which is unlikely, seeing that I’m following over 800 people. Then it became an hour. Some people say 3 hours.

real life Twitter fail whale!

Basically, the Twitter timeline is now experiencing delays - some tweets that were posted sometime back, somehow then show up in my timeline. “Twitter is Frozen” is now a trending topic on Twitter.

The timeline seems to be updating itself in a very odd fashion - the latest tweet in my feed is stuck at 30 minutes ago, but some of the tweets that did not appear earlier, are appearing now.

What’s not working seems to be only the main feed. The trending topics, the @ mentions and direct messages seem to not be affected.

So, what can you do?

1. Check individual tweeter’s pages manually. This seems to work, as you can see from my account.
2. Check your @ yourusername page for responses or replies.
3. It seems that new updates from new tweeters you just decided to follow will appear in your timeline instantly!
4. Just wait. Get back to real life.
5. Tweet less. It might help. Then again, it might not.

Why is this happening?

1. Obviously, Twitter is a very busy place.
2. It’s happened before, in January , March and August and September 2009.
3. According to Twitter: “We are currently investigating a problem causing many users’ timelines to be delayed. We will update with status here shortly,”
4. “Home timeline is blank; unable to access DM or mention timelines” is a known issue, according to the Twitter Support page on Zendesk.
5. Since September 15th, the problem seems to have been escalating, judging from the same URL above.
   

Where else can you read about Twitter being frozen?

1. Huffington Post.
2. Mashable.
3. The official Twitter Status blog.