Twitter has announced a rescheduling of its maintenance downtime due to the controversy surrounding the Iranian election, in a bid to have the site up and running during the day in Teheran and pulling it down while Iran is sleeping.

Initially the downtime was conveniently going to take place at 12.45AM US ET (while there would have been a lot less traffic on the site), though it’s now been aimed to go down at 2PM Pacific.

This was taken from the Twitter blog:

“A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

Our partners are taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide—we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation. We chose NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services early last year specifically because of their impeccable history of reliability and global perspective. Today’s decision and actions continue to prove why NTT America is such a powerful partner for Twitter.”