Twitter explains new mystery outage!

A freak double failure in its data centers took Twitter down for around an hour on Thursday, leaving millions without updates from friends, celebrities and news providers a day ahead of the Olympics.

"We are sorry," said Mazen Rawashdeh, Twitter’s vice president of engineering, in a message on the company’s support blog.

"Many of you came to Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around 8:20 am and 9:00 am Pacific Time (1720 GMT to 1800 GMT), users around the world got zilch from us," he said.

The glitch was fixed by about 1925 GMT, according to Rawashdeh, but not before the outage had affected users around the world.

In a blog post, Rawashdeh explained that the blackout was triggered by a data center system and its backup system failing simultaneously.

"I wish I could say that today’s outage could be explained by the Olympics or even a cascading buy," he said. "Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy."

Service was gradually restored and many users posted messages expressing relief in sarcastic terms.

"Wow. Wasn’t sure I’d survive that @twitter outage. I even took to Facebook. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Thankful it’s back," professional baseball player Michael Schlact tweeted.

Jason Carlin of Toronto tweeted: "Took time during the Twitter outage to explore some self-improvement."