Thu 10th of June, filed under Social Media
There was chaos on Twitter yesterday as the popular micro-blogging site suffered several hours of downtime.
Those attempting to use the site were greeted with the Twitter ‘Over capacity’ logo, affectionately known by tweeters as the ‘fail whale’. While the message was absent for other users, many experienced significant lag in timelines with tweets taking as long as 11 minutes to appear.
The issue was acknowledged by Twitter earlier in the day, with its status blog explaining two back-to-back incidents had temporarily incapacitated the site. To the anger and disappointment of the users, however, the problems continued; with more updates from staff stating that the site was having issues with 'latency' and that engineers were working hard to resolve the problem.
Eventually, Twitter deactivated a number of its features in order to resolve the situation; hovercards, trends, friend counts, Twitter search and profile image uploading were all disabled until timelines recovered.
An error with networking equipment
Speaking about the issue, the Twitter team disclosed that they were suffering from a network malfunction which not only affected the microblogging site itself but also Twitter APIs on third-party applications.
"We’ve identified the cause of today’s incident as an error with networking equipment," the blog stated.
"This networking error prevented us from serving at full capacity."
However, the glitch continued to affect the site. Despite several announcements that the issues had been resolved, the latest update from the blog simply reads: "We’re experiencing a recurrence of this morning’s networking issue. We’re investigating."
This is not the first time Twitter has suffered from an embarrassing bug. Earlier this year, a flaw was discovered in the site’s system that allowed users to force people to follow them.
Posted by Carli Harris
