Twitter Says Sorry After Another Outage

Twitter’s hopes to put outage problems behind it suffered a blow after the company was forced to apologise for a brief network crash on Tuesday.

The microblogging website said sorry to its 250 million users, blaming “unexpected complications” during a “planned deployment” that resulted in a crash that lasted for 46 minutes.

Network Outage

“During a planned deploy in one of our core services, we experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01am PST (7.01pm GMT),” said Twitter in a service update.

“We rolled back the change as soon as we identified the issue and began a controlled recovery to ensure stability of other parts of the service,” said Twitter. “The site was fully recovered by 11:47am PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

This latest crash comes after another outage on Sunday 2 March, when the network was apparently overwhelmed by the amount of tweets and retweets during the Academy Awards ceremony in the United States. The “selfie” picture featuring Brad Pitt, Ellen DeGeneres, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence was thought to be the main culprit.

In a strange twist of fate, this latest outage on Tuesday took place at the same time that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone was taking to the stage in Texas, to address delegates at the South by Southwest Interactive tech festival (SXSW), according to Reuters.

Previous Outages

Twitter has suffered a slew of network outages since it became popular back in 2008, but it has been investing heavily in its infrastructure and data centres to make the network more robust.

Yet the company is now a publicly listed entity, and shareholders could prove to be less forgiving if service outages persist going forward. The company itself is still making a loss, but revenues are growing in a healthy manner, thanks in part to advertising revenue from mobile devices.

Earlier this month, Twitter said it had fixed a bug in its systems that affected the privacy of more than 93,000 accounts for several months.

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