Tech Talk
By

Chenda Ngak /

CBS News/ July 26, 2012, 5:21 PM

Twitter explains, apologizes for outage

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/ Twitter
(CBS News) Twitter released an explanation and apology for the service outage on Thursday.

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The company said the root of the problem was a failure of two parallel systems at its data center.

Twitter released this statement on its blog:

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: Twitter.

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.

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.

© 2012 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
3 Comments Add a Comment
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ballwyllo says:
How can Twitter release a statement longer than 140 characters??
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earth5695 says:
Oh My Lord !

This is like losing ones electricity or heat during the winter !

Oh ! The humanity !
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Jaylah54200 says:
So people couldn't announce their every fart to the rest of the world for a couple of hours today. Who cares?
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