Twitter is down for most of the planet since 9:30 PM IST. This downtime comes just a day before the London Olympics, which points out to the massive number of tweets about the Olympics may have caused the outrage.

Downtimes or outages were reported from countries in North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Some users were apparently able to tweets through their phones or third-party applications.

The company has acknowledged the problem by updating their status blog which reads “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.” There are no further details of the problem.

The message on any page on the site reads:

Twitter is currently down for <%= reason %>.

We expect to be back in <%= deadline %>.

So, no clear reason, no deadline for services to be back on!

Twitter’s last outage occurred just over a month ago on June 21, and lasted nearly two hours. The site attributed the outage to a “cascading bug.”

Earlier this week, a Twitter spokeswoman told the Associated Press that “there were more tweets about the 2012 Olympics on a single day last week than there were during the entire Beijing Games.”

If you have nothing else to do meanwhile, check out my favorite iPhone 5 mockups, or locate UFO’s near you, get some brilliant typing lessons or play some retro games. Better yet, take a walk outside.

Update 11:50 PM IST: Twitter’s services are returning back to normal. There is still no official word yet.

Update 12:15 AM IST: Twitter has confirmed that the issue has been resolved. Still no word as to what the issue really was.

Update 3:05 AM IST: Twitter has just updated their company blog explaining the cause of the downtime.

The cause of today’s outage came from within our data centers. Data centers are designed to be redundant: when one system fails (as everything does at one time or another), a parallel system takes over. What was noteworthy about today’s outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time.

I wish I could say that today’s outage could be explained by the Olympics or even a cascading bug. Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy. We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future.

– Mazen Rawashdeh, VP, Engineering