Twitter Inc crashed on Tuesday for about an hour. This has happened for the second time in nine days when a software glitch held up the popular messaging service.

The company apologized to its 250 million users in a status blog, saying it had encountered "unexpected complications" during "a planned deploy in one of our core services".

The outage began around 11 a.m. Pacific time and service had "fully recovered" by11:47 a.m, Twitter said. 

The outage occurred just as Twitter co-founder Biz Stone took the stage in Austin, Texas, to speak at the South by Southwest Interactive festival, the annual gathering of tech enthusiasts that helped propel Twitter to national fame in 2007.

    

Twitter crashed briefly on March 2 as well during the Academy Awards. Twitter was burdened by a flood of tweets and retweets about a "selfie" featuring Oscar show host Ellen DeGeneres, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and many other celebrities.