Twitter slowly returns after longest service outage in six months

Twitter is slowly returning after suffering from a significant length of downtime today with users across the world unable to access the site on most platforms.

[Update - 18:53 GMT: Twitter is down again but the mobile site is still working]

Update from Twitter

Today’s outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components. We’ll provide updated information soon.

— Twitter Comms (@twittercomms) June 21, 2012

Twitter fail-whale

In what appears to be Twitter’s longest downtime in six months the site, mobile apps, and clients such as TweetDeck, were unable to write or show users’ tweets.

However, Twitter’s mobile site – m.twitter.com – was functioning better than most other platforms.

From what we can see from Twitter’s service dashboard the problem started soon after 5PM UK time, although it appears that the site has been suffering from a major spike in traffic in the past 24 hours.  The dashboard reports that the site is operating at 83% regular capacity and transfer times for the site’s content has tripped from 800 milliseconds to 2600 milliseconds.

The US and Canada appear to be the worst hit, although Europe, which reported better performance, was still struggling to work.

Twitter outage real time data

Twitter first reported the problem at 5:40PM London time on its status blog as a “site issue.” They said;

As we write the site is operating at 33% and climbing and services like the Tweet button are not operating as normally.