Twitter Suffers Sudden Outage

After a sudden, four hour, Twitter service outage yesterday, many deprived Twitterers were left in a froth with everyone asking, what exactly had happened? Twitter's official word on the event was that it was caused by a 'cascaded bug'. Don't worry if you've never heard the term, no one has either. Twitter apparently just invented it to explain what was happening to their system. Their explanation was that the bug doesn't confine itself to specific software and elements but rather, well, cascades into others. Twitter has claimed that part of the problem was due to the fact they were operating on an unstable version of Twitter, that was running at over 99% uptime for the past six months.

Hacking Claims

Everything about the story made perfect sense really. Apart from a group of hackers online calling themselves UGNazi taking credit for the outage, tweeting that they had taken down twitter.com for 40 minutes worldwide. Twitter denied this had anything to do with the problem, reasserting their previous statement on their official blog, saying: “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.”