Twitter Pretends to be Down While it wasn't

Twitter Pretends to be Down While it wasn't

Techtree News Staff, Oct 09, 2009 1454 hrs IST

Says problems were caused by a bug triggered by an edge case

Twitter, which seemed to have been working fine post the DOS attacks few months ago, faced another issue Thursday when the site stopped updating timelines and went into a freeze mode.

While users could tweet normally and even search for updates - the timeline refused to budge. This eventually led to people thinking that the site went down and actually stopped posting updates leading to a traffic dip. While in all actuality, it was just the timeline, the most visual aspect of Twitter activity, that wasn't functional. The interesting thing about this issue was that users were able to see what they tweet - but not what their friends tweeted in their timeline. Clicking on the username or using the search was a workaround. However, the procedure was time consuming and "unnatural" for most Twitter users which eventually lead to the dip in tweets and traffic.

Twitter has since then posted an update on its Status blog which goes something like this: "The problems this morning were caused by a bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services that powers Twitter. We have already fixed this bug and are making additional optimizations based on what we learnt."

In short, neither do we know what service they were talking about, nor as to what they eventually learned.