Twitter Went Down And Finally Comes Up: Who’s Responsible - 'Cascading Bug' or Hackers?

Social networking Web site Twitter had a confusing Thursday. The micro-blogging site crashed and revived multiple times over a two hour period beginning 9:00 am PDT.

The possibility of a hack was the first thing that came to our mind. However, Twitter has assured concerned parties the crashes were the result of internal failures and not hacking. The company said a "cascading bug" caused a domino-like effect on the system!

According to a post on the company's blog, Mazen Rawashdeh, the vice president of engineering, officials immediately began investigations when it was found Twitter was inaccessible for all web users on Thursday. They found a cascading bug in one of the infrastructure components. Rawashdeh assured millions of Twitter users, saying, "This wasn't due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today. A "cascading bug" is a bug with an effect that isn't confined to a particular software element, but rather its effect "cascades" into other elements as well."

The company has already taken "corrective actions" after discovering the bug.

Meanwhile, hacker group UGNazi tried to claim credit for taking down the world's biggest micro-blogging sire, CBS Atlanta reported.

Hacker Hannah Sweet (@CosmoTheGod), a member of the UGNazi hacking community, tweeted, saying: "UGNazi took Twitter down for 40 minutes worldwide with a "distributed denial of service" attack as a protest to the site's support of Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). CISPA is a proposed law that allows the federal government and private businesses to share Internet traffic information about possible cyber attacks. And, if the support is not withdrawn, hackers will continue taking Twitter down."

According to Pingdom, the traffic monitoring site, this is Twitter's worst crash in months after an hour-long hobbling on October 7. Twitter is not new to such outages. It went down at least twice in August 2009, once for several hours, when hackers caused a "denial of service" attack.

"We are currently conducting a comprehensive review to ensure that we can avoid this chain of events in the future," Rawashdeh wrote, adding that, "For the past six months, we've enjoyed our highest marks for site reliability and stability ever."

The Web site's service, however, is now back to normal. So, enjoy tweeting! 

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