October 12, 2009

It couldn't have happened at a worse time. Micro-blogging service Twitter suffered an outage Thursday, just as it reportedly was negotiating a licensing deal with either Google or Microsoft. The up-and-down day for Twitter mirrors the service's bigger struggles as it grapples with technical SNAFUs, a business model, and its blockbuster success.

For much of Thursday, users could post tweets to their own streams, but updates from their followers were scarce at best. After admitting to a totally unspecified "unplanned site outage" late Wednesday, Twitter waited until almost 2 p.m. ET Thursday to elaborate on the problem. It explained in vague terms that "timelines remain stale for users." It wasn't until sites such as TechCrunch started speculating that Twitter had fallen victim to a DDOS attack that Twitter posted an official statement explaining: "The problems this morning were caused by a bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services that powers Twitter."

For much of Thursday, users could post tweets to their own streams, but updates from their followers were scarce at best. After admitting to a totally unspecified "unplanned site outage" late Wednesday, Twitter waited until almost 2 p.m. ET Thursday to elaborate on the problem. It explained in vague terms that "timelines remain stale for users." It wasn't until sites such as TechCrunch started speculating that Twitter had fallen victim to a DDOS attack that Twitter posted an official statement explaining: "The problems this morning were caused by a bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services that powers Twitter."

Source:- http://www.businessweek.com