Twitter is down…again [update]

Here we again. Twitter is down, having been up a whole month after its last outage.

This time though, things appear to have gone catastrophically wrong. When Memeburn tried to log onto the web version of the social network, we were met with the following error.

According to Twitter’s status page, its engineers are aware of the problem and are working on a fix.

Update: The social network appears to be back up.

If you’re desperate for your 140 character fix, you could always try the mobile portal, which usually works.

The last outage was Twitter’s worst in eight months and was reportedly down to a “cascading bug” in its infrastructure.

Two major outages in two months. Are we returning to the “fail whale” years?

Twitter released the following statement explaining the outage:

We are sorry. Many of you came to Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around 8:20am and 9:00am PT, users around the world got zilch from us. By about 10:25am PT, people who came to Twitter finally got what they expected: Twitter.

The cause of today’s outage came from within our data centers. Data centers are designed to be redundant: when one system fails (as everything does at one time or another), a parallel system takes over. What was noteworthy about today’s outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time.

I wish I could say that today’s outage could be explained by the Olympics or even a cascading bug. Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy. We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future.

On behalf of our infrastructure team, we apologize deeply for the interruption you had today. Now — back to making the service even better and more stable than ever.