**As published at RCR Wireless News**

Twitter Inc. just did the inevitable. Twice.

First it launched a geolocation-based service called Places. Then a few hours later, the entire service crashed and stayed down into the late hours of Monday night out on the West Coast.

The fourth day of matches at the World Cup was still hours away when the infamous fail whale appeared, so it would be hard to blame the world’s most unifying event for Twitter’s downtime. It’s also worth noting that Apple Inc. could take some of the blame since the impending onslaught of iPhone 4 pre-orders was due to begin any minute (or hour) when the site’s servers overloaded. Read more