Breaking news: Twitter is currently experiencing a worldwide outage

This afternoon Twitter went offline and has remained in "maintenance mode" for the last 20 minutes or so. TweakTown has confirmed that the outage is worldwide with users in the US, UK, Australia, and Asia not being able to connect. When visiting the desktop and mobile versions of the site users are presented with the image below.

At the moment the outage is unknown and no official word has been given as to why the outage is occurring. I have reached out to my contacts at Twitter and am awaiting a response. In the mean time the TweakTown news team will continue to search for reports of what is causing the outage and will update this posting with anything that we find.

Edit: It appears that the outage lasted about 25 minutes with service now being restored in the US and UK. We are awaiting conformation that the social network is back up for the rest of the world and will update again if it goes down again.