Posted July 26, 2012 by Rapid Carol in Tech News

Twitter “apologise deeply” for today’s outage

Twitter have this evening apologised for the downtime experienced late this afternoon and have said they are “deeply” sorry.

The outage was first noticed around 4:20PM BST (11:20am ET) and the service was down for well over an hour, resuming at around 6:25PM BST (1:25pm ET).

Mazen Rawashdeh, VP, Engineering at Twitter said:

“We are sorry. Many of you came to Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around 8:20am and 9:00am PT, users around the world got zilch from us. By about 10:25am PT, people who came to Twitter finally got what they expected.”

It is now known that today’s downtime was due to an outage that came from within Twitter’s data centers.

The blog post continued:

“The cause of today’s 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.”

Twitter said they’d like to have blamed it on the Olympics or a Cascading bug – which was the cause of the failure back in june – but it was simply due to the infrastructure of the data centers.

Rawashdeh added: “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.

“On behalf of our infrastructure team, we apologise deeply for the interruption you had today. Now – back to making the service even better and more stable than ever.”

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