First Macworld, now the State of the Union. Several times during tonight’s SOTU address Twitter’s servers were overloaded, preventing users of the popular micro-blogging service from sending or receiving tweets for several minutes at a time.

A scan of Twitter’s public timeline during the speech showed a number of tweets about Bush’s (hopefully) last address to Congress. Personally, I got a flurry of tweets commenting on the speech from the people I follow on Twitter.

Midway through, Twitter’s website failed to process new messages and friend requests for several minutes at a time. Overall, the service held up, but the outage spikes were certainly annoying.

Earlier this month at Apple’s annual Macworld event, Twitter’s servers failed during Steve Job’s keynote. TechCrunch wrote about the failure at the time:

Twitter will probably just shrug their shoulders as they usually do during outages, and ultimately we’ll all keep using it, but if there’s one messge I’d like to get through to Twitter: keep messing with Twitter users and eventually users might flock elsewhere…

In my book, this is strike two for Twitter. (Okay, maybe one and a half.) Potential competitors like Pownce should try to seize this opportunity to make a home for Twitter users who want a stable service for micro-blogging.