At about 11:15 a.m. Pacific daylight time on April 20, the social media platform Twitter began to balk at posting my pithy little thoughts.

I would type something in the “Compose new Tweet” window, hit the “Tweet” button, and Twitter would respond with an error message: “Sorry! We did something wrong.”

Again and again and again and again and again I tried and each time Twitter responded with a “Sorry…” error message.

I deleted the Tweet and recreated it from scratch. I deleted the tweet, logged out, logged back in and recreated the Tweet. Each time I received the same error message, over and over again.

Then, after hitting the Tweet button a few hundred times or so in manic, machine gun-quick succession, I received a new error message:

Twitter is over capacity. Please wait a few moments then try again.

That did it. Feeling like I was contributing to a global phenomenon, I started dinging the Tweet button for all that I was worth—ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding…dang-dong!

Take that Twitter!

Whatever outage there was has now ended. The microblogging platform is back to running normally in my little corner of the world.

But just for a moment there, I felt good, you know? Really good—like I was part of something larger than myself!