What caused Twitter to go down like it did yesterday? Twitter users who tried to log in to the social network on Tuesday got a big surprise when they found out they could not tweet. The popular social network had a message on its site's front page saying that it was "down for maintenance." According to reports, the site first went down a little after 2 p.m. ET, causing its users to encounter problems when trying to access Twitter as well as disrupting mobile apps.   

Aside from not being able to access the social media site, users also reported of having been logged out of their Twitter account. They either failed when they tried to log in again or received a message saying that "something is technically wrong." A few who tried to log back in got a message saying that Twitter was undergoing maintenance.

Twitter explained that the cause of the site going down was due to a scheduled update. Some unanticipated problems during the update occurred to one of their hub services and led to the disruption of the entire network. They also explained that they were able to spot the problem and initiated a controlled reconstruction to make sure that other areas remained stable. A service representative for the social media site said that users could follow the updates posted on Twitter's service status page. The Twitter outage took place at the same time that its co-founder Biz Stone was appearing at the SXSW conference.

The social network expressed regret for the inconvenience brought to users when Twitter went down; @Support tweeted "Most users were impacted by a service outage when accessing Twitter via web and mobile apps. Service is restored. Thanks for your patience!" According to the Washington Post, "Twitter said 'unexpected complications' during what it called 'a planned deploy in one of our core services' caused the outage that began at 2:01 p.m. The company said it rolled back the change after realizing there was an issue and that service was restored by 2:47 p.m."