Twitter, one of the world's most popular social networks, is ringing in the New Year with mass outages, as the site goes down, comes back up, and then crashes again.

Likely strained by too many Happy New Year tweets, the web site has been essentially broken for hours now, and tech analysts and Twitter engineers are all scrambling to figure out why.

New 'Fail' Art

Twitter did manage to give its users an adorable bit of down for maintenance art while they wait (bidding goodbye to the fail whale of years past), but as Twitter continues to have its service disrupted, many are getting restless.

And for those who still want to tweet in the New Year, there's still a chance users can get and send Twitter posts using apps or the mobile site, with some success reported via this more indirect route.

Twitter Reports 'Some Site Issues'

But when it comes to what's causing Twitter to be down for so long, the Twitter status microblog will only say that there are some site issues that our engineers are working on resolving.

At the moment, the site appears to be fluctuating between periods of working and not-working. Twitter has been in the habit of going through extended outages at least once a year since 2007, when the web site's popularity began to explode.

Why is Twitter Down?

Tech analysts point to the site being chronically over-capacity, especially since thousands of Twitter users keep checking the site or trying to get access the moment the social networking site reappears.

In 2010, issues with Twitter's timeline cache caused the site to go down for several hours, an issue that may have been exacerbated by the Twitter revamp introduced to select users this year.

Most likely, however, the reason for the New Year's outage is simply that too many users keep flooding a site that, years on, still has enough network problems not to be able to handle it.

Keep checking back for Twitter updates as site engineers try to fix the problem, or check out status.twitter.com for minute-by-minute info.

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