NTT America, a hosting provider for Twitter, delayed a critical network upgrade originally scheduled to take place on Monday evening because of Twitter's reportedly important role- see http://iran.twazzup.com/ - as a communication tool in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election.

The Washington Post reported on Monday that because the Iranian government was attempting to silence traditional news outlets after legitimacy of the election's outcome (re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) has been questioned, blogs and social networking sites (such as Twitter) became an important source of information on the matter.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post that NTT recognized the importance of not interrupting Twitter availability on Monday and postponed its upgrade until Tuesday afternoon.

NTT America COO and CTO Kazuhiro Gomi said the company needed to upgrade network capacity in its data center in San Jose, Calif., due to a surge in traffic they had observed over the past few months.

"We received a request from Twitter that we have to postpone," Gomi said. The provider heeded the request because Twitter is an important client, he explained. Gomi estimated downtime associated with the upgrade to last no longer than 30 minutes. In delaying the work, NTT America took a risk. "Risk is that traffic ... generated by Twitter is getting so big, (it's) basically eating up a lot of our data center network resources, especially the segment where Twitter is hosted," Gomi said. "Other customers are riding on the same segment."

Late on Tuesday Twitter distanced itself from the US State Department which had said it was involved in the decision to keep the service running. Biz Stone added to his blog saying: "The State Dept does not have access to our decision making process. When we worked with our network provider to reschedule the planned maintenance, we did so because events in Iran were tied directly to the growing significance of Twitter as an important communication and information network. We decided to move the date. It made sense fo Twitter and NTT America to keep sercie active during this highly visible global event."

NTT America expected the work to take place on Tuesday afternoon without further delays.