Twitter back online, blames a “sudden failure” for outage

Twitter is back up and returning to normal following a service disruption that knocked the site offline for nearly 2 hours earlier this morning. Twitter’s official blog had this to say about the incident:

We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales. Our on-call team is working on a fix.

Update (5:18a): We are recovering from this incident. A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes. This made the site largely inaccessible. No data was lost or compromised during this outage.

While the outage was inconvenient for some, in all fairness Twitter has been doing quite well since the major DDoS attack that knocked it and several other sites offline back in August. Still no word on what caused the “sudden failure” but it happened just after the news broke that another major earthquake had struck Haiti, leading some to wonder if a large volume of tweets about the event is to blame.

Read [Twitter Blog]