PHP / Curl API failures

[DoubleDutch]

Hi,

On Sunday (1 Feb 2009) I embedded the following code in my website
(with appropraite variables set correctly):

                                  $url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/
update.json';
                                  $curl_handle = curl_init();
                                  curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, 
"$url");
                                  curl_setopt($curl_handle, 
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
                                  curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
                                  curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
                                  curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 
"status=
$message");
                                  curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, 
"$username:
$password");
                                  $buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
                                  curl_close($curl_handle);

Which worked fine up until Monday morning (02 Feb 2009, 10:00 GMT
ish). It then failed for about 24 hours. I started debugging it last
night and my PHP script was not getting any status code back on the
curl_exe line. Today (3 Feb) at about 08:00 it started working again
without me changing anything!

I post about 10 message an hour (no more!) so I shouldn't reach any
limits I guess. Can anyone suggest what is going on here ?

Thanks

DoubleDutch