Twitter’s Vine Experiences Its First Service Outage 5 Days After Launching (Update: And We’re Back)

Vine, Twitter’s latest foray into video sharing, seems to be having some service issues at the moment. We’ve been trying to access and use the app here at TechCrunch with no progress, and Vine has tweeted to confirm the service issues.

Vine launched last Thursday and has had a whirlwind of a week. Though relatively buggy for an app launched by a major company like Twitter, Vine was welcomed by the tech blogosphere as the next Instagram, as it lets you share six-second looping videos (with or without sound) to all your favorite social networks. However, the fun ended quickly as users noticed a slight porn problem on the app.

A porn clip called “DildoPlay,” which showed up on the app’s Editors’ Picks section on Monday, made matters even worse. Twitter claims that the clip was chosen because of “human error.”

Then, Apple removed Vine from the App Store’s Featured section, presumably after seeing that a porn clip had been featured within the app. Vine has since started censoring the app, filtering out searches for various porn-related search terms.

Today, the string of obstacles gets a bit longer with the reported service outage.

We’ll be sure to update the post as soon as Vine is back up and running. Stay tuned.

Update: It looks like service is back up for a few users, but Twitter has not confirmed that we’re at full stability yet.

Update 2: As you can see from Vine’s Twitter stream, the service has been back and forth all day. As of 6:00pm EST, everything seems to be ok.