Twitter brought to its knees by small bug

Social network’s outage caused by internal error

Jeremy Proome

June 22, 2012

Yesterday, Twitter went offline for a number of hours, leaving itchy-fingered microbloggers tweet-less.

The problem was said to have been a result of a cascading bug, which caused the site to go offline.

“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,” said Twitter on their blog.

A cascading bug can occur in one item of an internal system, and when it breaks, continues to disrupt other items through a domino-effect.

Despite Twitter’s snafu, the social network has had its highest stats for site reliability over the past six months.

Twitter’s Mazen Rawashdeh said yesterday: “In an average 24-hour period, twitter.com has been stable and available to everyone for roughly 23 hours, 59 minutes and 40-ish seconds. Not today though.”