The Twitterverse was struck with terror yesterday, as the hundreds of millions of users were denied service from the social media site. Following a day of crashes for both the online and mobile clients, Twitter released a statement explaining that the service was shut down due to a software bug that had worked its way throughout the system. In order to combat the issue, the site rolled back to an older version of its service to make it through the day.
“We are currently conducting a comprehensive review to ensure that we can avoid this chain of events in the future,” said Mazen Rawashdeh, Twitter’s vice president of engineering, via the company blog.
Twitter reported that over the last six months the site had held at 99.96 percent stability, but Thursday’s bug was just too much. “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,” Rawashdeh said. “Not today, though.”
To specify, Twitter service died out at noon Eastern time and returned at 1:10, only to crash once more a half hour later. The company maintains that the site was not hacked, though reports from Reuters claimed otherwise. A hacker group named UgNazi sent an email to Reuters claiming to have launched a denial-of-service attack against Twitter, leading to the crashes. This has yet to be proven true or false, and Reuters admitted that the attack could have just been a coincidence that occurred at the same time as Twitter’s bug.
Though Twitter’s service remains open and available, it is unknown if it has been brought back to full speed. The service’s status site has removed a message that previously said the issue had been resolved following the second crash. As of now, things are stable.
“It’s imperative that we remain available around the world, and today we stumbled,” Rawashdeh said. “For that we offer our most sincere apologies and hope you’ll be able to breathe easier now.”
