Twitter under attack? Users face two hour outage

Twitter users worldwide were in for a rude shock as the micro-blogging site went down for nearly two hours.

FP Staff|Jun 22, 2012, 11:53:17 IST

Twitter users across the world were in for a rude shock as the micro-blogging site went down. According to a blogpost by the company, the site was inaccessible for web users from around 9.00 am Pacific Daylight Time.

Once Twitter was down, rumours started flying that the site had been hacked. The site was down for nearly two hours.

The blogpost by Twitter's Vice-President Engineering, Mazen Rawashdeh said:

"We discovered that Twitter was inaccessible for all web users, and mobile clients were not showing new Tweets. We immediately began to investigate the issue and found that there was a cascading bug in one of our infrastructure components. This wasn't due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today. A "cascading bug" is a bug with an effect that isn't confined to a particular software element, but rather its effect "cascades" into other elements as well. One of the characteristics of such a bug is that it can have a significant impact on all users, worldwide, which was the case today.

[caption id="attachment_353598" align="alignleft" width="380" caption="Screengrab of UGNazi."][/caption]

As soon as we discovered it, we took corrective actions, which included rolling back to a previous stable version of Twitter. We began recovery at around 10:10am PDT, dropped again around 10:40am PDT, and then began full recovery at 11:08am PDT. We are currently conducting a comprehensive review to ensure that we can avoid this chain of events in the future."

According to this Mashable report, someone called @UGNazi took responsibility for hacking the site and bringing it down. But the company seems to have denied the report. The group posted as tweet saying, "We just #TangoDown'd twitter.com for 40 minutes worldwide!" Tango Down has been popularly used by Anoymous in the past.