Micro-blogging site Twitter experienced an outage at around 16h30 GMT making access to the website, mobile site and mobile apps intermittent for a period of approximately one hour.
In a move to keep its users updated, the microblogging site resorted to update users via its competitors website – Tumblr. In the first statement on Tumblr, Twitter confirmed there was an issue that users could be experiencing while trying to access the site and its services.
Previously when Twitter has had technical problems, the “Fail Whale” would appear on the website and mobile site but it didn’t appear this time fuelling confusion among users.
Many users claimed this was due to hacking activity. The microblogging site was however quick to quash the rumours in a statement explaining that once they discovered there was a problem, they investigated and discovered that the cause was a “cascading bug.”
“The issue has stabilized and all services are restored,” it later it confirmed.
Twitter further confirming that the problem wasn’t due to “a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars,” as some users had speculated earlier in the day.
They further explained “A “cascading bug” 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.
“As soon as we discovered it, we took corrective actions, which included rolling back to a previous stable version of Twitter,” it said.
Mazen Rawashdeh, VP, Engineering at Twitter, went on to say that this was one of the rare days in which the microblogging site didn’t achieve its 99.6 percent or 99.9 percent up-time as they have for most days in the past six months.
“In simpler terms, this means that in an average 24-hour period, Twitter.com has been stable and available to everyone for roughly 23 hours, 59 minutes and 40-ish seconds. Not today though,” he said.
In the connected world we live in, online services have become utility services like water or electricity and are expected to always be up. Despite the service providers’ best efforts, unexpected downtime do happen although it should be rare rather than a common occurrence should they wish to retain users.
