On June 21, 2012, the Twitter microblogging service was temporarily unavailable for the vast majority of users. The crash lasted for about three hours, giving rise to many rumors and versions of its cause.
The short text messaging service Twitter was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and has gained worldwide popularity over the years. Its audience numbers hundreds of millions of people, of which about 50 million use the service every day, leaving more than 400 million messages. Unsurprisingly, the glitch in its operation caused many questions from users.
The Twitter outages began at about 8 am Moscow time. At 9.10 the service resumed its work, but some problems were noticeable for another hour. In full, the service was available only to residents of the United States, they did not report any failures.
In the first hour of the service's inoperability, there were many rumors about the reasons for the incident. Some users stated that Twitter "fell" due to a hacker attack, others called the reason for the company's move to another office, new GIF-avatars and even broadcasts from Euro 2012.
The situation was clarified by representatives of the company, who said that the cause of the temporary inoperability of the service was a chain error that spread in the system and caused global problems. Immediately after detecting the failure and finding out its cause, a rollback was made to the previous stable version of the system, after which Twitter resumed work. The company's management has apologized to users for the technical problems encountered. It's worth noting that this was Twitter's biggest glitch since the start of the year. In general, the service is very reliable, working stably about 99.96% of the time.
Analyzing the reasons for the failure, one of the firm's specialists, engineer Sam Pullara, said that the problems began after the limit on the number of characters in messages was increased, which is currently 140 characters. After rolling back to the previous version of the system, the problems immediately stopped. There is no doubt that the company's engineers will draw conclusions from what happened and will try to prevent similar failures in the future.
