By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO and EMILY STEEL
MC Hammer was in the middle of an interview early Thursday morning when he encountered the unimaginable: life without Twitter.
After 10 minutes of trying to check messages from his 1.2 million followers on the site Twitter.com, the 1980s rapper known for his trademark balloon pants realized that the social-networking service had gone down.
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Twitter's Faithless'
"My baby wasn't acting right. Did I notice it was out? That would be the equivalent to asking, did you notice you woke up?" says Mr. Hammer, whose given name is Stanley Burrell. "My immediate thought was, 'There is no replacing this platform...I couldn't satisfy the need to communicate.'"
Across the globe, millions of other users found themselves suddenly robbed of the ability to broadcast their innermost thoughts. Twitter said a cyberattack took down the service for about two hours. Users couldn't even get the site's oft-seen "fail whale" -- a rendering of a cetacean lifted by tiny birds that indicates the site is overloaded.
A year ago, few beyond Silicon Valley had heard about the site, which lets users send 140-character messages called tweets to followers who sign up for updates, from the quotidian (what they are wearing) to the momentous (a birth). Thanks in part to celebrity endorsers like Ashton Kutcher, Twitter's popularity has exploded.
The service doesn't disclose how many users it has. But Twitter.com had more than 44.5 million world-wide visitors in June, according to comScore, compared with just 2.9 million in June 2008. Its skyrocketing user growth means that more people feel the pain of disruptions.
Thursday's outage foiled Ian Schafer, the CEO of Deep Focus interactive ad agency in New York. Mr. Schafer, who prides himself on live-tweeting conferences and events to his nearly 5,000 followers, was preparing to live-tweet from a bris, a Jewish circumcision rite, for two baby boys.
On the way to his car in the morning, Mr. Schafer kept trying to get on Twitter from his iPhone, but figured his Web access was down. When he arrived at the ceremony, he tried again. His tweet -- "I'm at a bris. Not mine" -- took 45 minutes to crawl through. The next missive -- "In case you were wondering, a bris of twin boys happens one at a time" -- took another hour.
So he gave up. He posted a few photos of the food on his Facebook page and called it a day.
Washington journalist Ana Marie Cox, who has posted roughly 6,500 tweets, was unable to tell her nearly 952,000 followers that she purchased a new pair of jeans because of Thursday's outage. Ms. Cox often shares her choice of attire with a tweet dubbed "pants status."
"Strangely, I've found that the world has continued to exist without me having shared that," says Ms. Cox, a national correspondent for Air America and a contributing editor at Playboy.
But she did get to leave a good impression with a lunch date. "This person probably thinks I'm very focused and polite," Ms. Cox says. Had Twitter been functioning, she says she would've been tweeting throughout the meal. "I would have come off like I usually do," Ms. Cox says, "which is obviously rude and insensitive."
In some ways, the Twitter crowd is a hardy crew. The site has had an array of minor outages for years. In fact, Thursday's outage wasn't the biggest: In 2007 and 2008 the site had outages of four hours or longer. To help tweeters muddle through the tough times, a cottage industry has sprung up. One site, Whentwitterisdown.com, blurts out pithy notes like "When Twitter is down move on to the next thing."
Justine Ezarik, a 25-year-old video blogger in Los Angeles, has developed sophisticated coping mechanisms for feeling connected to her more than 600,000 followers during outages.
She said she usually waits and sits at her computer pressing refresh until it comes back again and writes down Tweets in her black moleskin notebook to save for later, like "Just went to grocery store, saw a woman got hit by a grocery cart" for example. "It's rough but I make it through," she says. On Thursday, Ms. Ezarik slept in and was therefore blissfully unaware of being Tweet-deprived.
When he first heard Twitter wasn't working, Carson Daly, the host of a late-night show on NBC, thought, just for a second, that it may be the end of the service for good. And he was relieved. "Thank God it is all over now," he says. "It drives me crazy. It is nonstop. It is just the world's biggest office, and everybody 'replies all.' I don't want to be involved in these conversations, but I got sucked in."
Other Twitter addicts were grateful to have a few extra minutes tacked onto their day. "The truth of the matter is, I got back 10 minutes of my morning -- not to have to think of something interesting to twitter which is so damn hard at 5 a.m." says Richard Rosenblatt, CEO of Demand Media, a digital-media company.
Mr. Hammer, for one, doesn't wish to contemplate a Twitterless existence. "For me, it would be the equivalent of going outside to get on the freeways and find that the freeways are closed down," he says. "Twitter being down is the equivalent to no way to get to the airport."
—Julia Angwin and Elizabeth Holmes contributed to this article.Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com and Emily Steel at emily.steel@wsj.com
Twitter, a Service of Few Words And Many Followers, Goes Silent - WSJ.com