Twitter suffered its most prolonged outage in eight months on Thursday as the site was down for more than an hour for the first time since October 2011.
However, the previous outage took place in a relatively quiet time of day for the service — midnight to 1 a.m. EST on Oct. 7, according to tracking site
Pingdom. Twitter was mostly down for another one-hour period on Nov. 29 from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. EST, according to Pingdom, and suffered on-off periods for about an hour on Dec. 14, 2011, and Dec. 31 during peak times as well.
Still, according to Pingdom’s figures, Twitter has enjoyed 99%-plus uptime for every month this year and hit 100% in April. That’s a far cry from 2007 and 2008, when “Twitter Is Down” was a static headline on Mashableand the “fail whale” (curiously missing on Thursday) was a common sight.
Twitter tweeted that the outage was caused by a “cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components.” A Twitter rep provided further clarification: “A cascaded bug is a bug that’s not confined to a particular software element, but one that ‘cascades’ into other parts of the system.”
Meanwhile, users were at a loss with what to do with themselves during the interruption. “I didn’t have any idea how much I use Twitter until it went down,” commented one user,
Ronen Mendezitsky. “Not surviving. I work with Twitter,” wrote another user,
Stephanie Canarte. “It’s like I don’t know what’s going on in the world without it!” she added
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