Twitter Silenced by "Cascading Bug"

Twitter was taken offline for two hours due to a “cascading bug” in one of their infrastructure components that prevented users from logging in. Twitter officials dismissed any rumor that it was due to hacker attacks and said repairs would restore normal activity shortly.

Referring to it as a “cascading bug”, Twitter said users worldwide were affected and that rolling back the system to a previous stable version should have the issue fixed. Twitter used to be notorious for its “fail whale”, but this is the first incident in six months that crippled the micro blogging platform.

“A cascading bug is a bug with an effect not confined to a particular software element, but rather its effect cascades into other elements as well,” said Mazen Rawashdeh. “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. As soon as we discovered it, we took corrective actions, which included rolling back to a previous stable version of Twitter.”

Pointing to a reliability and stability rate of 99.96% to 99.99% for the last six months, Twitter Mazen Rawashdeh apologized for the downtime and reassured that everything will be back on track soon. Rolling back the system kicks the platform back into shape but doesn’t reveal the nature of the bug.

The cumulative effect of the cascading bug will probably be hard to pin down, but Twitter drive to keep improving the micro blogging platform will have it nipped soon. Hopefully, more details will be revealed along the way.