Twitter goes down

Social media site Twitter has suffered its second glitch in just over a month, going down for two hours yesterday due to a data centre glitch.

The company blamed an “infrastructure double-whammy” for the outage.

“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,” vice president of engineering Mazen Rawashdeh wrote in a blog post.

"We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future."

He said the company discovered a cascading bug in one of its infrastructure components last night and immediately rolled back to a stable version of Twitter. Full service was back up in just over two hours. 

“We know how critical Twitter has become for you — for many of us. Every day, we bring people closer to their heroes, causes, political movements, and much more,” Rawashdeh wrote. 

“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.”

This is the second outage for Twitter in just over a month. It also suffered an outage in late June for several hours, which the company also blamed on a cascading bug.

Twitter partners with NTT America for custom built data centres in Salt Lake City. It is not known at this stage whether the US subsidiary of the Japanese tech giant is likely to be held accountable for the outage.