Twitter Crashes And Returns In The Biggest Outage Since Its IPO

In what has to be the longest outage since its 2013 initial public offering, popular social networking service Twitter went down for “most users” earlier today, reports ZDNet. The outage started at 11:01 am Pacific Time and continued until 11:47 am.

As the norm is, Twitter confirmed that the service was indeed down, on its Status blog. No juicy details on the actual cause of the outage was made available though on the blog post initially. The post however did mention that it was caused by a planned change to its “core services,” which resulted in “unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users.”

Anyway, like we mentioned earlier, the service was back up and running in less than an hour. In an update, the blog post went on to become more detailed. Currently it says that Twitter had to roll back the changes made to Twitters core services and do a “controlled recovery” to ensure stability of other parts of the service.

While Twitter did manage to fix this latest update in less than an hour, it still remains the longest Twitter outage in recent times. If we are to go by the past Status blog updates, we will see that most other outages that happened recently were sorted in less than 25 minutes. Also to be noted is the fact that in case of those outages, they affected only “some users” – which is markedly different from “most users” that this outage affected.

In the initial days of Twitter, outages, more famously known as the “Fail whale” were common occurrences. In case you are not aware, the term Fail Whale was in reference to the image that Twitter showed up when it went down. The image showed a whale being hoisted by a bunch of birds with large text at the bottom stating “Twitter is over capacity”. By November 2013, Twitter confirmed that they had retired the Fail Whale – much to the disappointment of Twitter addicts which had begun to have a liking for it.

Over the years, Twitter’s reliability increased even though the traffic on the website continued to rise dramatically. One recent example showcasing the kind of web traffic that Twitter receives was the famous Ellen DeGeneres Tweet which posted a selfie of herself along with a bunch of Hollywood stars during the Oscars earlier this month. That Tweet by Ellen went on to become the most retweeted one in the history of the service with over 2 million retweets.

Were you affected by this recent Twitter downtime?

[Image Credit: Twitter]