Twitter Follower Counts and DM Unavailable at This Time

Twitter is experiencing yet another outage. While problems at the social networking site are common, they seemed to have died down recently. Now, a bunch of users are reporting that their followed and follower counts have been reset and both display zero.

Twitter has acknowledged the issue and has said that it a fix is on its way. It also reassures them that the data hasn't been lost, it just isn't displaying properly. Interestingly, the new Twitter seems to be working, but not all the times.

"Some features are intermittently not available on Twitter at this time. - Ability to Follow a user; - Follow counts; - Sending DMs. Twitter is working to resolve this issue in full," Twitter wrote on its Status blog.

The issue seems to be rather widespread and a lot of people are reporting it. Of course, talking about Twitter is one of Twitter users' favorite pass-time, especially when the site is experiencing problems. The fact that issues like this aren't that uncommon doesn't seem to phase people.

Several issues are affecting the site at the same time. One of the easier to spot is the fact that many users see 0 followers and followed counters. However, users are also unable to follow anyone at this point. Finally, direct messages don't work either.

A most likely unrelated problem with the New Twitter also seems to be un-fixed almost a day after Twitter acknowledged it.

The second panel, which provides the meta-data and contextual information isn't displaying correctly in some cases. This may only effect some browsers.

Twitter is no stranger to outages and problems. During the 2010 World Cup, the site struggled to stay up as it couldn't cope with the increased traffic. Things quieted down after that and the Fail Whale certainly isn't a regular occurrence anymore.