Twitter Outage Starts Some Stomachs Rumbling

A hiccup in Twitter's service Tuesday started some stomachs rumbling as many hungry consumers found the site inaccessible to location tweets from their favorite food trucks.

But savvy foodies should not fear -- most of those mobile gastro-delights on wheels double-post their locations on Facebook.

In addition, gourmands on the go may also find weekly schedules of where their favorite food trucks will be by going to company websites, or by making a copies off their Twitter sites.

Such precautionary steps may not be such a bad idea, given that very few -- if any -- websites are completely bulletproof from outages. Just two years ago, for example, Twitter was the target of a denial of service attack, which took the site down for several hours.

On Tuesday, Twitter issued this warning to its users:

We're temporarily disabling #NewTwitter. Our engineers are working on re-enabling it. We'll send an update once the issue is resolved. about 13 hours ago via web from SoMa, San Francisco by troy

And according to a Reuters report, Twitter also encountered cases where the older version of the site was inaccessible to its users as well. Despite the service disruption, Lloyd Blanchard, owner and operator of a Washington, D.C., truck that sells Dangerously Delicious Pies, says he's not concerned.

"People are resourceful and smart. I think they'll be able to find us without Twitter," says Blanchard, who notes that he parks his truck near recreational areas with lots of foot traffic, and piggybacks off the business generated by other food trucks parked nearby to create a food court on wheels.

Nonetheless, Blanchard, like PattywagonLA, a Los Angeles mini-hamburger street vendor, and Cupkates, a San Francisco Bay Area mobile cupcakery, post their location information on Facebook, too. And both PattywagonLA and Cupkates post their weekly schedules either on their home pages or their Twitter accounts.

"We should probably post our schedules. I know a lot of other trucks do that," Blanchard says. "But business has been good, even though we don't, and we've been selling out [of pies] everyday."