If you’re ever uncertain if Twitter is down, check Bing realtime search (of Facebook).

And then check Google+ (whose trending topics are poorly calculated, but whose search is good.)

Then stare into their abyss. Then get Twitter notifications from all your devices calming you, reassuring you, that you’ll never go twungry again.

1. Google Plus trending topics are poorly calculated.
I looked at them in the beginning and middle of Twitter’s outage. Not a blip about Twitter. There’s no way Twitter’s downtime was not topic du jour (even searched it, yep, lotsa chatter). Below you’ll see a screengrab I took at 10:55AM Pacific. Google calculates that Alec Baldwin is trending, yet there hadn’t been an update about him for over 10 minutes.

2. Bing trending topics are poorly calculated.
You can filter for just Twitter or just Facebook. Either way… nothing about Twitter downtime. Lots about “Cash Advances” though.(!?)

Ah, a compliment!

3. I do appreciate Bing realtime search.
It’s both better and worse than Google’s realtime search (RIP). Better: It includes public Facebook updates, and you can filter for Twitter or Facebook (Google never grabbed Facebook stuff). Worse: It “fakes” a little bit of its realtime-ness by rewinding back in time each time you visit the page, and gives you  a burp of old updates. But overall, very nice.