Twitter suffers major outage, restored

Reports of Google's popular chat service suffering a major outage had only begun to thin down when reports about Twitter going down globally began gathering momentum. The popular microblog suffered a global outage yesterday, rendering it inaccessible to its expansive user base. At the time of the outage, Twitter put out a message saying that users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter and that their engineers are working at resolving the issue. Twitter later added an update saying the issue had been resolved. 

Twitter: Back up!

In an official blog post, Twitter's  VP (Engineering), Mazen Rawashdeh apologized for the outage, and revealed that the cause of yesterday's outage came from their data centers. He added, "Data centers are designed to be redundant: when one system fails (as everything does at one time or another), a parallel system takes over. What was noteworthy about today’s outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time". Rawashdeh, further in the blog post stated that the outage was not caused by the Olympics, as most had begun to think, or by a cascading bug, but an "infrastructural double-whammy."  

Late last month too, Twitter faced a major outage that affected its website and mobile applications. Back then, Twitter in its statement attributed the outage to a cascading bug in one of their infrastructure components. A cascading bug, they explained, "is a bug with an effect that isn’t confined to a particular software element, but rather its effect “cascades” into other elements as well. One of the characteristics of such a bug is that it can have a significant impact on all users, worldwide, which was the case today".