If you suddenly felt cut off and alone from the rest of humanity this morning, it was because of a bug. In this case, it was a bug that caused Twitter to quit updating sometime this morning. According to Twitter, it was "a bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services that powers Twitter." They say it is fixed, so Twitter should be back to its rock-solid, always on performance.
By the way, if any FTC informants are reading this, note that I receive for free something of value from Twitter - as does everybody else. That freebie, of course, is Twitter itself.