Twitter was up and down on Thursday due to what the company’s labeled as a cascading bug, whose effect was felt all over the world. Users reported difficulties connecting to the site. However, Twitter engineers were quick to solve the issue by restoring to an earlier and more stable version of the site. The interruption was felt for about 2 hours.
Initially there were reports that Twitter had been hacked but this was quickly dismissed by the company’s vice president of engineering, Mr. Mazen. Twitter offered sincere apologies to all the affected users. Mr. Mazen continued to say that they worked on the problem as soon they discovered it. “Not how we wanted today to go. At approximately 9:00am PDT, we discovered that Twitter was inaccessible for all web users, and mobile clients were not showing new Tweets. We immediately began to investigate the issue and found that there was a cascading bug in one of our infrastructure components. This wasn’t due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today,” he wrote.
Twitter has a history of going down, especially due to increased traffic. This last happened in the New Year. Twitter has however improved on this area, dropping the tag of flaky reliability and the fail whale cartoon that was associated with the site when was on the down time. Twitter has invested a lot in the service, leading to better stability in the recent past. They have achieved high scores for site reliability and stability, reaching even 99% in the past six months.
Image source: http://www.ctv.ca
