In a move that is surely showing the flailing business model of Twitter, the free micro-blogging site has axed the use of text message updates to most of it’s UK users, in a bid to cut costs.

An estimated $1,000 per year is the cost to Twitter for every UK user. And they’re not prepared to find a way to make money from these users – it seems easier to just cut everyone off.

As most of us know, Twitter has been suffering huge infrastructure problems with what seems like daily outages of some form another, with many users finding the service increasing frustrating. If it’s not the IM features, it’s the text or website blogging features that are down – every user of Twitter knows all too well the classic whale picture when things aren’t working as they should. With this recent cost-cutting exercise, is it too little too late? Or is it the sign of a system desperately trying to find a way out of a badly scaling web app?

During the writing of this article, twitter is displaying for UK users a box stating “important changes to our SMS service” on the left, above the twitter comments – which is a little ridiculous, as the infamous “We’re working to restore IM services to all users. Thanks for your patience!” message is showing the underlying problems of the site to the right of the page. Patience is getting very thin now guys – I know lots of people that have already gone elsewhere purely due to the frustration these problems are causing.