Twitter Blames Data Center Problems For Outage

Twitter is blaming systems failures -- not a crush of traffic around the Olympic games -- for an outage today that saw people around the world experience problems accessing the micro blogging site for more than an hour.

The San Francisco-based company says the outage was caused by a "noteworthy" double failure in its data centers. When one system fails, a parallel one is meant to take over, but Twitter says two systems coincidentally stopped working at around the same time.

Twitter's vice president for engineering has apologized and says the company is "investing aggressively" in its systems to avoid a repeat situation.

Visitors to the site today were greeted with a half-formed message saying that "Twitter is currently down." The fields where a reason for the outage and a deadline for restoring service were apparently meant to go were filled with computer code.

Sluggishness or outages were reported for more than an hour in countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

(Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press.  All Rights Reserved.)