OK, it was more like a coincidentally timed outage, but …

Today’s SmartyPig giveaway was held at 3:00 PM Central Time. At approximately 3:02, I noticed that I couldn’t hit Twitter’s web interface any longer – it was asking me to log in as an employee. Sadly, I don’t work for Twitter, so I couldn’t use that. Twhirl, to the rescue! (The outage lasted less than 25 minutes)

Here’s the error we were all getting:

I’m going to chalk this up to SmartyPig being such an awesome service that it made Twitter bow before it. Kudos go out to Mike Ferrari (@mferrari) and Jon Gaskell for founding this service that so many people get excited about. As if the service itself wasn’t a fresh, new idea, their monthly giveaways sure get people motivated and interested in their product. Very effective marketing, in my opinion.

Hey Mike, once I win that gift card, I’m going to start contributing money!

If you haven’t checked out SmartyPig, you really should. They offer some pretty sweet interest rates and make it fun and easy for you (and those you grant access to) to create savings goals and monitor your progress toward those goals.

UPDATE: The giveaway has been rescheduled for 3PM Central on October 2.