Twitter Data Center Failure

A Twitter outage on Thursday that lasted as long as two hours for some users was caused by separate data centers failing at nearly the same time, the company said in an apologetic blog post. A freak double failure in its data centres took Twitter down for around an hour on Thursday, leaving millions without updates from friends, celebrities and news providers a day ahead of the Olympics. "We are sorry," said Mazen Rawashdeh, Twitter's vice president of engineering, in a message on the company's support blog. "Many of you came to Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around 8:20 am and 9:00 am Pacific Time (1720 GMT to 1800 GMT), users around the world got zilch from us," he said. The glitch was fixed by about 1925 GMT, according to Rawashdeh, but not before the outage had affected users around the world. In a blog post, Rawashdeh explained that the blackout was triggered by a data centre system and its backup system failing simultaneously. "I wish I could say that today's outage could be explained by the Olympics or even a cascading buy," he said. "Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy." It was Twitter's second outage in about six weeks. On June 21, the microblogging service went down about 9 a.m. Pacific and started to come back just after 10 a.m., only to fail again before full recovery began after 11 a.m. The company blamed that outage on a cascading bug, a type of problem that spreads from one software element to others.

Published on 20th Mar 2013 @ 9:13 AM