Yesterday’s Twitter Outage: Hackers or Bugs
Twitter was offline yesterday, with about four, tense, tweetless, hours passing before it was back up to full function.
Of course, afterwards the online community was understandably curious to what exactly had happened. Twitter, after all, is not just one of the most popular social networks but amongst the most powerful websites in the world.
One sensational story that came out was that service was interrupted by a hacker attack from hacktivist group UGNazi when they tweeted about it, taking responsibility. This isn’t a completely ridiculous notion considering UGNazi have been responsible for attacks on HostGator, the Washington Military Department and even Google.
Twitter Denies Hack
However, Twitter have consistently denied this claim. Their official statement blamed the sudden outage on what they called a ‘cascaded bug’, so named because the bug isn’t contained in one part of the system but instead cascades into the other parts.
Part of the issues Twitter say, was down to an unstable version of the site they were running off for the last 6 months of, that was causing it to run between 99.6 and 99.9% uptime.
Twitter released this official statement today, in 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.”
