TWITTER HAS SAID that an internal problem at its data centres caused yesterday’s outage which brought the site down for around two hours.
Apologising for the major fail whale yesterday Twitter has explained in a blog post that the down time was due to an “infrastructural double-whammy”.
Engineer Mazen Rawashdeh said that he wished the outage could be explained by the Olympics or a cascading bug, which was responsible for last month’s problems.
Rawashdesh said that the cause lay within Twitter’s data centres:
Data centres 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 [yesterday's] outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time.
Well, there you go then.
Last month’s problems were claimed to be the work of a hacker group, but Twitter denied this. Rawashdesh said that Twitter is “investing aggressively” in its systems to avoid such problems in the future.
He also tweeted (when Twitter was back up of course) that it hadn’t been the easiest day at the office:
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say