Twitter taken offline by a "cascading bug".



Twitter has blamed going of for more than an hour on a "cascading bug", this rendered the site unavailable on Thursday. Users of Twitter from around the world reported the difficulties with loging into the social networking site, these problems started around 17:00 BST. The service was down for about 2 hours while the engineers tried to solve the issue. In a blog post, Twitter dischatged reports that it had been hacked and it offered "sincere apologies" to the users. "A cascading bug is one with an effect that isn't confined to a particular software element, but rather its effect "cascades" into other elements as well," explained Mazen Rawashdeh, the site's vice president of engineering. "One of the characteristics of such a bug is that it can have a significant impact on all users, worldwide, which was the case today. As soon as we discovered it, we took corrective actions, which included rolling back to a previous stable version of Twitter."

By Andrew Barringer and Daniel Milnes