Twitter Downed by Technical Issues, Not Hackers
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The Twitter 'fail whale' error message, created by Australian artist Yiying Lu.
CREDIT: Twitter/Yiying Lu |
Nope, it wasn't hackers who brought down Twitter yesterday (June 21).
Despite the claims of the hacker group UGNazi, who (ahem) used Twitter to crow about how they knocked Twitter offline, technical problems seem to have been what caused the microblogging service to go dark for more than an hour.
"We just ?#TangoDown'd http://twitter.com for 40 minutes worldwide!" proclaimed one of the UGNazi Twitter feeds after the service was restored.
UGNazi didn't specify how its members purportedly knocked Twitter offline.
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Twitter went dark shortly before noon ET yesterday, and didn't come back until about 1:10. About an hour later, it again went offline, this time for about 10 minutes.
"There was a cascading bug in one of our infrastructure components," wrote Twitter vice president of engineering Mazen Rawashdeh in a blog posting yesterday. "This wasn’t due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today.
"A 'cascading bug' is a bug with an effect that isn't confined to a particular software element, but rather its effect 'cascades' into other elements as well," Rawashdeh said.
Today (June 22), UGNazi countered that explanation as just spin.
"When a company has the chance of deniability, they will take the chance to do so," the @UG account tweeted.
UGNazi arose a few months ago as another Anonymous spin-off group. They're clearly modeled on LulzSec, which ended its own spate of merry mayhem just about a year ago, but don't quite have LulzSec's wit or charm.
UGNazi has claimed to have penetrated or taken down military and government websites, as well as websites of organizations supported the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), two controversial online-governance bills in Congress.
