Twitter went down due to software bug and had the cascading effect on the functioning of its site.Twitter is no longer a start up company and I assume it must have enough resources to ensure that it has required plan with regard to deployment and subsequent rollback plans in place in case any enhancement or bugs slips in. While I agree that for a site like twitter , its hard to do full testing for each change but again its worthwhile to at least have proper build process in place where in if some build cracks the existing code base, it makes sense to do the rollback immediately.Seems like it did not happen this way today.
The funny thing about this is twitter is down and yet it says tweet it.
Twitter has been suffering outages Thursday. Above, a screen shot of Twitter's status page. (Twitter / June 21, 2012)
By Salvador Rodriguez This post has been corrected. See note below.
June 21, 2012, 2:53 p.m.
Twitter says its intermittent outages Thursday have been caused by a software bug.
The microblogging service has been crashing frequently throughout the day as a result of a "cascaded bug," which is a glitch "that isn’t confined to a particular software element," a spokesman for the company said.
"Its effect 'cascades' into other elements as well," he said.
At one point, I was unable to access the site for more than half an hour, and throughout the day it seemed to be running slower than normal.
Twitter said it would provide updated information about the crashes soon. For now, Twitter's status website continues to say that the issue is ongoing and that the company's engineers are trying to solve it.
The company did not provide information about how widespread the crashes were, how long they lasted or how they have affected its advertisers.
It also was unclear how the crashes affected Kia Motors' ad campaign, which Thursday was promoting the trend "#NBAFinals" leading up to Thursday night's NBA Finals Game 5 between the Miami Heat and the Oklahoma City Thunder. Twitter did not respond to questions about how its crashes affected Kia Motors' paid campaign.
