Twitter has been open about its recent shortcomings, with outages piling up as World Cup fever grips its userbase, resulting in the service becoming patchy and unreliable.

This is becoming an all too familiar sight...

According to a posting to the official Twitter blog, the service has been suffering under the record traffic and unusual weight of updates hitting the micro-blogging service this month. Apparently, these issues had been a while coming, but the sudden explosion of interest in the service around the World World cup, things have gone south for Twitter very quickly indeed. While the folks at Twitter have been making ‘real-time adjustments’ so that it can maintain the service as well as possible during the spike in traffic.

That said, the blog post was fairly honest about the way that things have been going, saying,

“As we go through this process, we have uncovered unexpected deeper issues and have even caused inadvertent downtime as a result of our attempts to make changes. Ultimately, the changes that we are making now will make Twitter much more reliable in the future. However, we certainly are not happy about the disruptions that we have faced and ever caused this week and understand how they negatively impact our users.”

It’s interesting stuff, and certainly we’ve seen plenty of users complaining about the recent bouts of downtime, which seem to have tended to hit in the early afternoon for those of us in Ireland and continued being patchy well into the evening in some cases.

Twitter has warned users that, over the next couple of weeks, we could see planned downtime while the service undergoes some maintenance in an effort to address the issues that have cropped up recently. The blog posting assures us that this maintenance won’t overlap with any World Cup matches, which is very good news indeed for those of us who’ve developed the habit of using Twitter as a commentary feed.