Twitter down; Congress survives

{mosads}But Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), an avid Twitter user who sends all his own tweets, told The Hill he barely noticed the Twitter outage because he was preoccupied with voting. The House voted Thursday on a bill to block new, major federal regulations. Many House members are also rushing to leave town for the weekend.

“I actually tweet most in the evening, so hopefully it will be restored by today,” Polis added.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), who calls himself a bit of a Twitter “addict,” said he also managed to miss the outage. 

“I saw on Twitter that there had been an outage,” he told The Hill. “I’d actually been catching up some work, so I hadn’t been trying to tweet.”

But he still remembers the last time Twitter went down. 

“I felt a little naked,” he said of the previous outage. “But I didn’t notice this one, which is probably good.”

Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (Md.) noticed Twitter was down, but the service was working again in time to hold a planned Twitter town hall.

Twitter is back online, so the town hall with @House Democrats on extending middle class tax cuts will go forward at 2:30pm ET #AskDems

— Steny Hoyer (@WhipHoyer) July 26, 2012

At the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), digital coordinator Nick Marcelli tweeted a call-back to a previous GOP Twitter campaign for the hashtag #doingfine, a play on President Obama’s comment last month that the private sector is “doing just fine” on job growth.

Twitter is #doingfine today. #tcot

— Nick Marcelli (@NickMarcelli) July 26, 2012

Twitter went down for about an hour and a half earlier in the day. The microblogging service informed users trying to reach Twitter pages that they were working on the problem but did not provide details. The Twitter Status page was also unavailable for some users. Twitter later apologized for the outage, the second service failure so far his summer. The last outage, in June, disrupted political tweeting, as well.

Story originally posted at 1:25 p.m. and since updated.