Workplaces likely saw a rise in productivity today, as Twitter suffered periodic outages that of midday it was still trying to resolve.
Twitter said the problem was due to “a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components.” Basically, that means one possibly small thing went wrong, but then everything that depends on that thing couldn’t work properly, and so on down the pyramid of dependencies until the whole system came to a stop.
Those situations can be tricky to fix, since it can be difficult to determine what is broken and what is simply not getting the input it needs to function. That’s not according to Twitter, that’s speaking from experience.
UPDATE:
Twitter posted a lengthier explanation on its official blog, in which Mazen Rawashdeh, vice president, Engineering, gave a little more detail on the process it undertook to restore service.
Related links:
CNN Money – Twitter crashes hard, Internet freaks out
Mercury News – Twitter suffers series of outages
CNET – A rough day for Twitter addicts
Twitter blog – Today’s turbulence explained
Twitter “Fail Whale” by YiYing Lu
