Everyone’s favourite 140 character social media site Twitter has been down worldwide since lunchtime today.

Dubai ‘tweeters’ began to notice the outage at lunchtime, and the Guardian has reported that the site has been down since 8.20am GMT time (12.20pm local time).

As of 5.40pm some users in the UAE were reporting being able to use Twitter again, meaning there appears to be a slight improvement, while others still can’t access the site or tweet anything out.

Twitter being down here is a big deal, as there are approximately 2.58 million Twitter users in the UAE according to Global Media Insights (there are 9.5 million people in the country in total).

We’re sure plenty of the UAE’s prominent tweeters are feeling the absence, however Dubai 92’s Catboy, who has 24,100 Twitter followers seems to be more upbeat about the whole thing, telling us:

“Twitter thinks it’s down… It should see my last DEWA bill. Then it really would be down.”

Twitter’s official comment? “Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution.”

To get technical, it seems four of Twitter’s five APIs are down (application programming interfaces are the things that applications like Chrome etc use to speak to Twitter). The fact that four of five of them are down may explain why some people are intermittently able to use the site.

One thing is for sure, however, a site of this magnitude being down is a costly exercise, so it will be all hands on deck until it comes back up.