Twitter released an explanation and apology for the service outage on Thursday.
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The company said the root of the problem was a failure of two parallel systems at its data center.
Twitter released this statement on its blog:
We are sorry. Many of you came to
Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around
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.
