Twitter apologises for outage

Twitter went down not once but twice yesterday, apparently, amid flurries of rumours that the social network had been the victim of a distributed denial-of-service attack.

The service first hit the rocks at around 4pm our time, yesterday afternoon, for around an hour before coming back on – then it suffered another outage around tea time, 6pm, before making a full recovery.

Hacking activist group UG Nazi (which is loosely associated with LulzSec, or has been in the past) claimed that it had instigated a DDoS attack, but Twitter denied that any third-party mischief makers were involved.

In a blog post, the social network noted: “We immediately began to investigate the issue and found that there was a cascading bug in one of our 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 being one which causes many ripples and effects in other systems, as well as the system it originally manifested in. Hence the global impact of the problem, and the social network was forced to roll Twitter back to a previous stable version in order to tackle the issue.

Twitter has offered up its sincere apologies for the double outage, which is obviously something that it’s hoping not to repeat.

The company noted that in the past six months, it’s had uptime to the tune of at least 99.96 per cent, and as high as 99.99 per cent at many points, and that it intends to maintain those levels.