Twitter suffers second outage in 5 weeks

    SAN FRANCISCO, July 27 (APP/Reuters): A data center glitch
brought down Twitter for roughly 2 hours on Thursday, as the
micro-blogging service suffered its second widespread outage in
5 weeks and another blow to its reputation and reliability.
    "I wish I could say that today's outage could be explained
by the Olympics or even a cascading bug," said vice president of
engineering Mazen Rawashdeh in a blog post after service
resumed. "Instead, it was due to this infrastructural
double-whammy. We are investing aggressively in our systems to
avoid this situation in the future."
    On Thursday, users trying to log on to its website were
greeted only by an incomplete error message: "Twitter is
currently down for. We expect to be back in."
    Twitter - infamous for its "fail whale" outage icon in its
early years showing a whale held up by a flock of birds - last
went dark for several hours on June 21.
    The June episode revived fears that stability issues may
once again be plaguing Twitter, which claims to have
significantly improved its infrastructure. The company blamed
that incident on a "cascading bug".
    Founded in 2006, Twitter's phenomenal growth means it has
struggled to handle the ever-rising volume of tweets. But in
recent years, it has devoted considerable resources toward
improving reliability in a move to project itself as a mature,
polished brand.
    Chief Executive Dick Costolo, who has focused on improving
the service's profitability and attracting advertisers, said
last month that Twitter has 140 million active monthly users who
send 400 million tweets daily.
    Google Inc's online messaging and voice-calls
service - Google Talk - also went down for hours on Thursday in
what appeared to be a separate outage. The issue should have
been resolved as of mid-morning, according to the company's
status update page.