Despite the fact that Twitter (News - Alert) is one of the biggest and baddest social networking sites on the web, it still has run-of-the mill problems from time to time. On Sunday, the company suffered an hour-long issue that froze all user timelines and delayed delivery of new tweets for quite some time. Considering just how many people are getting their daily news from Twitter these days, those kinds of outages can hurt a company pretty badly.

Twitter is basically the king of its own social kingdom, really being the only site that is known for delivering messages in 140 character snippets. The draw of the site can also be its undoing if these kinds of problems continue to surface. If people can’t communicate quickly, and if they can’t depend on the site to deliver those messages, there really isn’t any point to use it.

While one delay and outage for an hour isn’t going to cripple the site, the tech team better be working hard to make the right tweaks to avoid a repeat. Reports indicate that the delay affected both Twitter.com and the mobile applications across all platforms.

The site was never actually taken offline, which seems to hint that the problems weren’t major. That doesn’t mean that users are going to feel good about the site though. It could take a couple of days or even weeks before some fickle social gadflies decide they can trust Twitter again.

These problems become bigger when you consider that the site has been actively taking aim at third party applications. The site wants users to only use their official apps, but if those apps can’t be relied upon, it becomes a bit of a conundrum for the company. Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter have never been official rivals either, but it’s a safe bet that somewhere, Mark Zuckerberg had a small smile on his face while the delay occurred.