Twitter Denies Claim That Hackers Caused Today’s Outage

Twitter says hackers were not involved in the outages that have plagued the service on and off today.

Twitter said that the outage was caused by “a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components.” Twitter later explained, also via tweet, that a cascaded bug “has an effect that isn’t confined to a particular software element; its effect ‘cascades’ into other elements as well.”

Mashable has reported that a group of hackers called UGNazi is claiming credit for bringing Twitter down today.

@RT_com @YourAnonNews @AnonopsSweden We just #TangoDown‘d twitter.com for 40 minutes worldwide! #UGNazi

— UGNazi (@UG) June 21, 2012

In an email to Marketing Land, a Twitter spokesperson says that’s not what happened, and said the “accurate explanation” is what the company tweeted earlier today.

Twitter’s outage began in the 12 pm ET hour and even now, some four hours later, parts of the service still appear to be struggling.

Postscript: Twitter has now explained today’s turbulence in a blog post that repeats the above and also offers an apology to users worldwide. The company says it became aware of the outage at about 9:00 am PT, when web users were unable to access Twitter and mobile clients stopped showing new tweets.

We immediately began to investigate the issue and found that there was a cascading bug in one of our infrastructure components. This wasn’t due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today.

Twitter says that part of the solution to today’s outage was to revert back to a previously stable version of Twitter, and that the service has seen between 99.96 percent and 99.99 percent uptime over the past six months.