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Some users of Twitter, the addictive microblogging service, noticed that it abruptly stopped working for them over the past 24 hours. The reason? An abrupt switch away from Joyent, the company which hosted — past tense — Twitter's servers. Companies change Web hosts all the time, and the moves are always wrenching. But Joyent and Twitter had just happily announced that they were working together to keep Twitter up through this Sunday's Super Bowl.

Yesterday, Twitter said of Joyent:

Throughout our amazing growth, Twitter has relied on Joyent's highly scalable infrastructure.

Today, Twitter said:

The good news is we finished a major infrastructure project tonight, which we've been working on for months and that we think is going to help a lot.

The obvious conclusion is that, even as Twitter was praising Joyent, it was preparing to move off its servers. And the larger lesson? That whenever a customer praises a vendor, they're lying through their teeth.

Dave Young, Joyent's CEO, tells me that his company doesn't keep customers on contracts, so he disagrees with some people who characterize the Twitter split as a divorce. And he said that yesterday's blog post were his company's response to those who would blame Joyent for Twitter's outages, even when it wasn't responsible. Twitter's new Web host? NTT, the Asian telecommunications giant, which should help Twitter's ambitions to expand into Japan. One downside: NTT is unlikely to serve as a punching bag for unhappy Twitter users the way Joyent has.