Microblogging site Twitter hit by unexplained outage


Is productivity back on the rise?
Microblogging site Twitter confirmed Thursday what eagle-eyed Internet users had already noticed: Twitter was down, thanks to a "cascaded bug."
"Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue," the company wrote Thursday on its official status page.
After approximately two hours, company representatives pointed FoxNews.com to a blog post offering a technical explanation of sorts for the outage: "Today's outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components. We'll provide updated information soon."
Users were quick to pile back on the service, and equally quick to offer their own snarky perspective.
"I'll never forget where I was when Twitter was down because I was at home on my couch checking Twitter," wrote Robin McCauley.
"When you see only one set of footprints it was then that I was off doing work -- for Twitter was down," wrote Matthew Baldwin.
Financial analysts expect the company to be the next viable candidates for an initial public offering (IPO), the Wall Street Journal wrote. Twitter has recently stressed the reliability of its service, which was prone to outages in its early days. During that inconsistent period, sites like IsTwitterDown.net were launched to keep track of outages.
There was no indication Thursday that the outage was the result of malicious attacks, the Associated Press reported.
Ironically, the status update indicating that the company is aware of disruptions to its service has a Twitter button, allowing users to share that bit of information.
Over 3,000 people Tweeted that they couldn't Tweet.