Earlier today (Tuesday 11th August) Twitter went down, albeit briefly for around half an hour, with the official status blog reporting first “a site outage” but then changing tone later to say it was busy analysing traffic data to “determine the nature of this attack”.

Of course, while the Twitter servers may well have been up and running in under an hour of going down, the same cannot be said of third party applications which took considerably longer to recover it would seem. Not, it has to be said, as bad as last week following the 15 fat Russians in a revolving door DDoS attack which saw the Twitter service impacted for days and some third party apps struggling to get back up to speed for days after that.There is, as yet, no word from the Twitterati as to exactly what did cause this latest downtime, and if it was indeed an attack then what kind and from where. I suspect, whatever the official reasoning, whatever the evidence, that the damage could well have been done. The DDoS attack, which also hit Facebook and LiveJournal remember, which appeared to have been directed at keeping one vocal blogger off the InterWeb to quiet his political arguments, impacted on Twitter way harder than might be reasonably expected of such a popular service.

You might be forgiven for thinking that the social networking come microblogging site du jour would be able to repel borders with a little more techno-savvy vim and vigour, after all Facebook and Livejournal managed to do just that and were not suffering like Twitter for days.

If the hackers and botnet merchants don’t bring Twitter down then, at least according to a new Gartner report, general disillusionment might. In the wonderfully entitled ‘Hype Cycle Special Report 2009‘ which evaluates the maturity of 1,650 technologies and trends in 79 technology, topic and industry areas, Gartner argues that the Twitter explosion has meant that the “inevitable disillusionment around ‘channel pollution’ is beginning”. It’s not all bad news for Twitter though, Gartner reckons that once business gets past that period of disillusionment Twitter will probably find widespread acceptance as far as mainstream implementations are concerned.

Assuming the next big thing has not already come along to swallow it up by then, of course. And assuming that it can get past the ‘buy your followers here‘ and ‘celebrity obsessed‘ phases it is going through right now that is.