In a way, it was easy to learn about Twitter crashing even though Twitter wasn’t there to tell you it had crashed. The key indication was that Twitter was not available. It’s like when a newspaper goes out of business, you can not read all about it in that day’s lack of issue of the paper.

Twitter blames what it calls a “cascaded bug” for what was the company’s biggest outage since last November. A Twitter rep told Mashable: “A cascaded bug is a bug that’s not confined to a particular software element, but one that ‘cascades’ into other parts of the system.”

Oddly missing from the failure was an appearance by the Fail Whale, the graphic of a whale being held aloft by birds that has traditionally signaled an outage on the site.

Irate customers demanded their lack of money back from Twitter.

Personally, I used the down time to learn German and in the time left over I read to orphans and took up origami.