No Tweets in Iranian Election

A twitter outage in Iran on Friday reportedly foiled some supporters of a leading reformist candidate in the country's presidential election.

Former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi had relied heavily on the broadcast text-messaging application to rally voters, according to the Wall Street Journal. Heavy voter turnout was expected to help him beat hardliner President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But CNN reported that text messaging was not working in Iran on Friday.

Ahmadinejad was winning as of late Friday afternoon, according to various news sources.

Multiple twitterers in Tehran wrote that the SMS (Short Message Service) system in Iran had been taken down, just hours before polls opened.

One Twitter account recently reminded people not to wear reformist color green when it heads to the polls, as the government has threatened not to allow such people to vote. It asked to spread the word via SMS but at least for now that is not possible.

It was unclear what caused the service disruption.