The world’s most famous microblogging website, Twitter suffered some serious technical issue on Thursday causing a series of server crashes until the whole network had to be shut down. The incident happened between 8.25 to 10AM (Pacific Time) , when the website failed to load any request and was displaying a basic HTML error page without any sort of CSS. Twitter Engineers worked hard trying to identify the problem and finally solved the issue within an hour. By 10.30 AM (PT) the site was up and running.

The exact reasons for the twitter server outage are still unclear but the company released an official statement, for all their users apologizing for the inconvenience. With the Olympic Games starting on Friday, the company needs to make sure that their data centers and servers are working efficiently because this will be one of the peak times for Twitter users. Here is their official statement written on Twitter Blog by Mazen Rawashdeh,(VP, Engineering):

Official Twitter Apology Letter

We are sorry. Many of you came to Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around 8:20am and 9:00am PT, users around the world got zilch from us. By about 10:25am PT, people who came to Twitter finally got what they expected: Twitter.

The cause of today’s outage came from within our data centers. Data centers are designed to be redundant: when one system fails (as everything does at one time or another), a parallel system takes over. What was noteworthy about today’s outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time.

I wish I could say that today’s outage could be explained by the Olympics or even a cascading bug. Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy. We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future.

On behalf of our infrastructure team, we apologize deeply for the interruption you had today. Now — back to making the service even better and more stable than ever.

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