Social networking site Twitter issued an apology on Thursday for a global outage that left the site inaccessible for more than an hour. The company blamed the outage on a technical fault and said despite speculation; the outage wasn’t related to high traffic tweets about the London Olympics, which begins on Friday.
In a blog post on Thursday night, vice president of engineering, Mazan Rawashdeh, said, “We are sorry. Many of you came to Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around 8:20 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. PT, users around the world got zilch from us. By about 10:25 a.m. PT, people who came to Twitter finally got what they expected: Twitter.” Rawashdeh blamed the outage on the concurrent failure of two data centers, calling it an “infrastructural double-whammy.” When one data center fails, a parallel system is designed to take-over, and in this case, the second system failed also.
