I offer this in the spirit of shared grief over the loss of the ability to find out exactly where your friends are eating lunch.  Twitter shut down about an hour ago, and I just noticed it now as I’m sitting down to, er, eat my lunch.  (Salami sandwich and light pasta salad, if you really need to know.)

Film Industry Network reports that Twitter is so down that no one can reach Twitter to find out it’s down, or something:

Twitter is down this afternoon with no announcement yet from the company as to why. The site is also out of reach when users try to log in worldwide.

As a platform for sharing news, opinions and more, it’s quite ironic that the web’s most up-to-date information delivery service is offline. This is not the first outage that Twitter has experienced, however when big services go down, there are inevitable inconveniences for businesses who use the #tag to promote products. Other major websites have been affected in the past including a very embarassing Gmail outage that forced over 100 million customers to wait for hours to access their inbox. With so much reliance on services like Twitter, Facebook and other social sites, can the web communicate easily without them?

We will wait for Twitter to announce what the situation is but for now there appears to be no service and their website is offline.

Feel free to offer your social-status updates in the comments section as we struggle through this national global crisis.  Hey, they forgot my extra mayo …

Update: Looks like Twitter is back on line.  Tell us your stories about how you managed to keep civilization going in the Great Twitter Blackout of 12 pm ET.

Update II: Oh, yeah, I almost forgot … be sure to follow me on Twitter (@edmorrissey).  That way you won’t miss my lunch tweet tomorrow.

Update III, 1:52 pm ET: Looks like Twitter is down again.  I’m having a diet creme soda, and … ah, never mind. #facepalm