How we feel when Twitter is down.

Twitter has been in and out, in and out for the past three hours, and the company finally has an explanation, albeit limited to 140 characters: "Today's outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components. We'll provide updated information soon." At first, we suspected this BuzzFeed service piece, which explains how to make any animated GIF your Twitter avatar.

Twitter's policy explicitly prohibits animated GIF avatars, probably to avoid having the site go all Myspace on everybody or maybe because pulsing and looping hurts Larry T. Bird's tiny brain. The site started experiencing issues the day after the great GIF invasion. Did the GIFs had anything to do with it? Twitter declined to say, instead forwarding on the above tweet. There goes that theory.