Twitter, one of the most popular social media service, went down for most users during a scheduled maintenance, due to some unexpected software glitches.
Twitter, the renowned micro-blogging service, went down for most users Tuesday. It was the longest outage for the company since its initial public offering. The disruption in service was caused due to unexpected software complications during a scheduled maintenance. The unexpected failure of the service occurred twice within a period of nine days that stalled users from accessing the site for about an hour. The company apologized to millions of users explaining the cause of the service and reporting a full recovery.
The outage began at around 11:00 a.m. PST and the website took more than 45 minutes to fully recover by 11:47 a.m. PST. A previous outage occurred March 2, during the Academy Awards, one of the busiest times when tweets from different users flooded the services. That outage lasted for less than 25 minutes. The popular "selfie" featuring Oscar show host Ellen DeGeneres, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and many other celebrities, became a hot topic of discussion during the show and the site was flooded with tweets, retweets and favorites.
Twitter updated its Status blog Tuesday, which marked the latest outage to be the biggest for the Web and mobile platform in at least the past year. Twitter resolved most of its outages in 25 minutes or less, which according to the social network affected "some users." But Tuesday's outage affected "most users" indicating a widespread problem.
"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," Twitter wrote on its Status blog. "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. The site was fully recovered by 11:47am PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience."
The outage occurred as the company's co-founder Biz Stone took the stage during South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, Texas. The company has suffered from interrupted service in the past, with some users complaining latency in viewing and sending tweets for about 25 minutes in January.
