Twitter back, but still sluggish in some areas

LONDON — People across much of the planet were having problems accessing Twitter on Thursday, a day before the 2012 Olympic Games are expected to cause a spike in use of the micro-blogging site.

The company acknowledged the problem, saying in a statement that its engineers are “currently working to resolve the issue,” although it didn't go into any further detail.

Users reported outages or sluggishness in trying to access Twitter from countries in North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

The Olympics are expected to bring an unprecedented surge of activity by sports fans on social networking sites such as Twitter.

At the recent European Championship final, users fired off more than 15,000 tweets per second, setting a sports-related record for the site.