So, I’m a late riser most days (I like to go to bed late, real late). And today when I awoke, I thought it was a Vanilla Sky dream situation — but rather than Tom Cruise being the last person on Earth, I thought I was. You see, like most mornings, the first thing I check is Twitter. The problem this morning is that the most recent tweet was from 3 hours ago.

And that’s still the case. Twitter’s timeline has been frozen for hours sending users no new tweets. Most of its APIs are frozen, meaning apps like Tweetie aren’t working. Twitter is looking into it, but still seems to have no idea what is going on. But some smart users have figured out a workaround, sort of.

While Twitter may be frozen, you can still send tweets and the service receives them. And while no one can see them in the main stream, Twitter search is still working. So, if you happen to use a service like Brizzly with groups (which use the Search API), you can see your followers most recent tweets.

While Brizzly isn’t completely open to the public yet, plenty of users still have invites to give out so ask around.

Or if you don’t feel like going out of your way for a work around. As always, we recommend the list of 15 alternative things to do.

I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that situations like this has happened before, and back then it also backed up the service for several hours. But the difference now is that Twitter is several times the size of what it was back then in terms of both manpower and funding.

Update: It looks like FriendFeed is receiving a steady stream of updates as well. There are much less tweets than normal coming in, but that’s probably because everyone assumes Twitter is totally down.

Update 2: And the issue finally looks fixed now.