Twitter experienced major outage yesterday due to an internal configuration issue

Yesterday Twitter went down across major parts of the world including the US and the UK. Twitter users reported being unable to access the platform on web and mobile devices. The outage lasted on the site for approximately an hour.

According to DownDetector.com, the site began experiencing major issues at 2:46pm EST, with problems being reported from users attempting to access Twitter through its website, iPhone or iPad app and via Android devices.

While the majority of problems being reported from Twitter were website issues (51%), nearly 30% were from iPhone and iPad app usage and another 18% from Android users, as per the outage report.

Twitter acknowledged that the platform was experiencing issues on its status page shortly after the first outages were reported online.

The company listed the status as “investigating” and noted a service disruption was causing the seemingly global issue.

“We are currently investigating issues people are having accessing Twitter,” the statement read. “We will keep you updated on what's happening.”

This month has experienced several high-profile outages among social networks. Facebook and Instagram experienced a day-long outage affecting large parts of the world on July 3rd. LinkedIn went down for several hours on Wednesday.

Cloudfare suffered two major outages in the span of two weeks this month. One was due to an internal software glitch and another was caused when Verizon accidentally rerouted IP packages after it wrongly accepted a network misconfiguration from a small ISP in Pennsylvania, USA.

Reddit was experiencing outages on its website and app earlier in the day, but appeared to be back up and running for most users an hour before Twitter went down, according to DownDetector.com.

In March, Facebook and its family of apps experience a 14 hour long outage which was reasoned as server config change issue.

Twitter site then began operating normally nearly an hour later at approximately 3:45pm EST.

The users on Twitter joked saying they were "all censored for the last hour" when the site eventually was back up and running.

On the status page of the outage report Twitter said that the outage was caused due to “an internal configuration change, which we're now fixing.”

“Some people may be able to access Twitter again and we're working to make sure Twitter is available to everyone as quickly as possible,” the company said in a follow up statement.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1149412158121267200

On Hacker News too users discussed about number of outages in major tech companies and why is this happening. One of the user comments reads, “Ok, this is too many high-profile, apparently unrelated outages in the last month to be completely a coincidence. Hypotheses:

1) software complexity is escalating over time, and logically will continue to until something makes it stop. It has now reached the point where even large companies cannot maintain high reliability.

2) internet volume is continually increasing over time, and periodically we hit a point where there are just too many pieces required to make it work (until some change the infrastructure solves that). We had such a point when dialup was no longer enough, and we solved that with fiber. Now we have a chokepoint somewhere else in the system, and it will require a different infrastructure change

3) Russia or China or Iran or somebody is f*(#ing with us, to see what they are able to break if they needed to, if they need to apply leverage to, for example, get sanctions lifted

4) Just a series of unconnected errors at big companies

5) Other possibilities?”

On this comment another user adds, “I work at Facebook. I worked at Twitter. I worked at CloudFlare. The answer is nothing other than #4.

#1 has the right premise but the wrong conclusion. Software complexity will continue escalating until it drops by either commoditization or redefining problems. Companies at the scale of FAANG(+T) continually accumulate tech debt in pockets and they eventually become the biggest threats to availability. Not the new shiny things. The sinusoidal pattern of exposure will continue.”