Twitter Fail Caused By Triple Data Centre Collapse

Yesterday’s 40 minute Twitter fail was caused by breakdowns at three data centres, which left many users unable to Tweet, the microblogging service has admitted.

Twitter apologised to users for the outage, which was caused by failure of its resiliency measures, and came on the same day that numerous cloud-based services went down, including Microsoft Azure and Google Talk.

The company said the downtime was not caused by an upsurge in traffic because of the Olympics, as some had suspected. Once one of its data centres went down, another one was supposed to take over. But that parallel system failed, as did another one, making for a triple whammy.

Parallel problems

“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,” explained Mazen Rawashdeh, vice president of engineering for Twitter, in a blog post.

“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.”

Another IT failure yesterday saw RBS services take a hit. Customers complained they were unable to use their bank cards or access online banking services, but RBS said the problems had been fixed.

“Online banking is now fully operational and debit card transactions are processing as normal. We continue to monitor the systems closely and will keep our customers fully informed. We apologise for any inconvenience caused,” a spokesperson said late last night.

The problems came just a matter of weeks after major IT failures at RBS left many of its customers, including those of NatWest, without funds or the ability to transfer money.

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