A "general site outage" took Twitter down for 27 minutes from just after 3am GMT Wednesday (11pm EDT/8pm PDT Tuesday).

Visitors to the site were greeted with the "Fail Whale," an illustration of a whale used by Twitter to signify the site is over capacity, or a message advising a technical fault before access returned at 3:30am GMT.

"We’re now recovering from this unplanned downtime," in a status message. "We apologize for the interruption in service."

The glitch pushed up Twitter's downtime this month to 41 minutes, according to , a site that measures reliability of access to Web sites.