Twitter suffered a service meltdown for several hours on Thursday, becoming inaccessible for Web users - who couldn't even tweet complaints about the outage.
Mobile users were also affected as the tweet stream failed to refresh. Twitter VP of engineering, Mazen Rawashdeh, says the micro-blogging site immediately investigated the problem and found there was a “cascading bug” in one of its infrastructure components.
“This wasn't due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today. 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,” explains Rawashdeh.
Once the problem was identified, Twitter took corrective actions and rolled back to a previous stable version of the service. “We are currently conducting a comprehensive review to ensure that we can avoid this chain of events in the future.”
A group of hackers known as UGNazi claimed responsibility for the outage, tweeting at one point: “We just #TangoDown'd twitter.com for 40 minutes worldwide! #UGnazi.” The tweet was directed at accounts associated with infamous hacking collective, Anonymous.
Mere coincidence
According to Reuters, UGNazi also contacted the new publisher via e-mail, stating it launched a distributed denial-of-service attack against Twitter, because of the company's support for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.
The Reuters report quotes a “security professional” downplaying the likelihood of the group being solely responsible for the Twitter outage: "It was mere coincidence. The backend of Twitter is having issues, which is unrelated to the very small attack."
According to Twitter, over the past six months, the site has received its highest ratings for reliability and stability. “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,” says Rwashdeh, adding that Thursday was not one of those days.
“We know how critical Twitter has become for you - for many of us. It's imperative that we remain available around the world, and today we stumbled. For that we offer our most sincere apologies and hope you'll be able to breathe easier now.”
Once service was fully restored, Twitter users were quick to crack jokes and make light of the outage. Some tweets included:
“The twitter crash of 2012 (yesterday) is going to be to us what JFK was to our parents.”
“While Twitter was down I wanted to tweet about how Twitter was down.”
“Thousands of people almost starved to death today because they could not post photos of what they were going to eat when Twitter was down.”
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