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Twitter’s Extensive Outage This Thursday Caused by a ‘Cascading Bug’

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Twitterholics will no doubt have experienced a traumatic experience at around 6pm yesterday evening – a complete outage of the popular micro-blogging website.

It became clear yesterday afternoon that the site was experiencing some serious issues, with an outage extending to over one hour before users were able to access the website, mobile apps and post tweets. The service returned for around 20 minutes before going down again briefly and then returning for good.

So what caused this problem? Twitter does experience intermittent issues but rarely goes down completely, especially for this long. Well, Twitter has explained that the problem was due to a ‘cascading bug’ within its software system. The bug didn’t affect one particular thing; rather it caused numerous issues between different systems, hence the ‘cascading’ name.

The issue affected the entire Twitter service worldwide, and inevitably people soon began to speculate via Facebook. The number one prognosis was a hack attack, perhaps by the infamous Anonymous group. Some also speculated that the problem was caused by Euro 2012 or GIF avatars on some user profiles. However, it turned out to be an internal problem at Twitter HQ.

The bug was eventually fixed by rolling back the version of Twitter to a previous version, although the relevant fixes have since been put in place to prevent this type of thing happening again. A blog post on the official site read,

“We know how critical Twitter has become for you — for many of us. Every day, we bring people closer to their heroes, causes, political movements, and much more.

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.”

Thankfully the site is back up and running today and seems fine. Are you relieved to have Twitter back or are you not all that bothered?

Let us know your thoughts on our comments below or via our @Gadget_Helpline Twitter page or Official Facebook group.

Via: Twitter Blog

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