What did the bird eat and poop out in this new Twitter is down message?

Clouds, a malfunctioning robot, the Twitter bird looking like it just had a bowel movement involving Pac-Man? Yes, it all adds up to more Twitter downtime as the service continues migration and settling into new servers. The only similarly popular service that has worse reliability and scalability is Second Life.

Maybe reliability will change for the better when the dust settles. Hopefully. If, however, the Twitter crew are taking cues from SL’s Linden Lab nothing will change and eventually Twitter will begin to lose loyal users to other places, strange error message graphics aside.

Twitter 0. Pownce and other competitors? +1.

Update 9:03am PST Twitter is back up. No explanation behind Pac-Man reference. Somebody get Namco on the line.