Popular social networking site Twitter was on June 21, blamed of cascading bug, as it became inaccessible. Users of the social networking site from around the globe complained of difficulties logging on to the site.
Problems started from about 17:00 BST. The services of the website were affected for about two hours while the engineers tried to solve the problem. Twitter in a blog post dismissed the reports that it has been hacked and offered sincere apologies to the users.
Mazen Rawashdeh, the vice president of engineering explained, “A cascading bug is one with an effect that isn’t confined to a particular software element, but rather its effect “cascades” into other elements as well”. He further explained, “One of the characteristics of such a bug is that it can have a significant impact on all users, worldwide, which was the case today.”
Corrective actions were taken as soon as it was discovered. The measures included, rolling back to the earlier stable version of Twitter. Last time the website faced a similar downtime in the UK on New Year’s Day when it crashed after becoming overloaded. Earlier the site was known for its flaky reliability as the ‘fail whale’ cartoon appeared when the site overloaded.
