Twitter yesterday experienced an outage that left hundreds of millions of its users unable to access the popular microblogging site and its mobile applications.
With millions of users unable to access Twitter’s services it was rumoured that it could be because of a surge in 2012 London Olympic’s related traffic to the site.
While the it was down, Twitter re-directed users to a different page which stated: “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.”
In an apology, Mazen Rawashdeh who is the Vice President of Engineering at the microblogging site said the cause of the outage came from within our data centers.
“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,” he said.
He was quick to dismiss the rumour that it could’ve been the Olympics traffic or even the cascading bug which caused Twitter’s previous outage.
“I wish I could say that today’s outage could be explained by the Olympics or even a cascading bug. Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy. We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future,” he said.
He further expressed the company’s apology saying Twitter is deeply sorry for the interruption and it is back to making the service even better and “more stable than ever.”
