Twitter is celebrating the launch of Twitter Places by presenting all users with the Fail Whale for at least the past hour.

According to the Twitter status blog, this time the outage is due to “scheduled maintenance,” and more information will be posted as it becomes available:

We are experiencing site-wide availability issues due to scheduled  maintenance. We’re currently working to address the issues. We’ll update with more information as it is available.

If the maintenance is scheduled, why doesn’t Twitter announce it beforehand? And why schedule it between 9-10pm on the West Coast? And why is information pending if this is all routine? Twitter’s been out of commission at least twice this week- most recently Sunday, and before that, on Wednesday during the day. It looks like you’re going to have to go elsewhere to discuss Justin Bieber for the time being, Twitter users.