While you may not be seeing as many tweets about needing morning coffee, your friends are probably posting copious photos of dogs in Santa hats as you read this.

Which is why yesterday Twitter and Skype conspired to crash the holiday party. Both services went down within hours of each other.

Skype users, of which there are 560 million, took to Twitter to complain and find updates about the service. Twitter denies it, but the network probably trembled under the weight of the increased traffic and some users started to see small features on the site, like direct messages, break or fail to save.

When Skype goes down, you can search Twitter to find out if it's having problems or if it's just you. But what to do for Twitter?

Well there's http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ and http://downrightnow.com/.

There's also the custom http://istwitterdown.net, which exists to capture the 20,000+ monthly Google searches of phrases like "is Twitter down?" and "Twitter is down."

Visit the site and you'll get a big "Yes" or "No" with a link to the Twitter status blog.

But the plot thickens further--if you have trouble reaching IsTwitterDown.net, there's also IsIsTwitterDownDown.com.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries