After Google’s Instant Messaging service Google Talk and microblogging website Twitter had suffered an outage, it would be not wrong to label yesterday as, ‘The Day of Outages’. For Gtalk, the outage lasted for around five hours, reasons for which are yet unknown. However, Mazen Rawashdeh, Vice-President Engineering, Twitter stated in a blog post, that the outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time.
The San Francisco-based company said the reason for outage came from within its data centres. When one system fails, a parallel one is meant to take over, but two systems coincidentally stopped working at around the same time, causing an infrastructural double-whammy, Twitter said.
On behalf of the infrastructure team, Rawashdeh apologized for the interruption in services and promised that the company will aggressively investigate its own systems, so as to avoid such mishaps in the future. The company faced similar disruptions in services in June, this year, due to a technical glitch, that had lasted for about two hours.
So, now that we know of the real reason behind the outage, we can clear off 2012 Summer Olympics, from any sort of accusations in relation to the downtime. However, what would be interesting to know, is whether the systems at Twitter are equipped enough to handle the massive surge of bloggers, when the Olympics open today. This surge was noted during the UEFA European Football Championship final, when the site had registered 15,000 tweets per second, setting a sports-related record.
