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Codebreaker

Twitter down

Marc Sanchez Jul 27, 2012

For the second time in as many months, Twitter had a major outage yesterday. In a blog post apologizing for the outage, the company says that a data system failure caused the problem. Apparently the main data center and its backup failed at the same time. From the blog, VP, Engineering Mazen Rawashdeh writes:

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.


So what does this mean for all the Olympic tweets that are about to come pouring in? Well, you know that big breath you take before you dive underwater and try to swim from one end of the pool to another? Let’s hope that’s what yesterday’s outage was. One big breath, and into the pool that will most likely bring a record number of tweets.

A note to competitors via the Guardian: “London 2012 chairman Seb Coe said last week: ‘I have found quite a close correlation between the number of tweets at competitive times and the level of under-performance.’”

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