This screen shot taken from the microblogging site Twitter.com early Sunday morning Aug. 1, 2010 shows the Twitter page that greeted users announcing Twitter being down for planned maintenance. According to Twitter the maintenance is scheduled between 2 a.m. 7 a.m. EDT Sunday. As such in that time some users will not be able to access Twitter. (AP photo)

(AP) -- The microblogging site Twitter Inc. was out of commission for a couple of hours early Sunday for some of the roughly 100 million users around the world.

Instead of the usual screen that allows people to send a , the home page indicated the site was down for "planned " but was expected to be back in a few hours.

It was accompanied by a cartoon.

According to a status website run by the San Francisco-based company, Twitter's hosting provider, NTT America, was to start the maintenance at 2 a.m. EDT Sunday and it was to last about five hours.

Some tweets appeared to start moving again after about 90 minutes but some users were still unable to send messages hours later.