Not a Peep From Tweeters as Twitter Crashes

Tweeters were squawking yesterday when Twitter crashed hard. The system was down from noon to 1 pm ET, but then crashed again an hour later and intermittently throughout the afternoon when Twitter admitted the "issue in ongoing," reports CNN. Most service was restored by late afternoon. The problem was caused by "a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components," and not hackers, said a Twitter statement—even though hacker group UGNazi boasted to several media outlets that it had taken Twitter down in a denial-of-service attack.

Twitter had to revert to an earlier version to get the system back up for its hundreds of millions of users, and is now conducting a "comprehensive review" to avoid the problem in the future, reports the Los Angeles Times. It was the biggest Twitter outage since last October. Users desperate to keep up a steady stream of communication fled to other social networks, including Tumblr, where they ... complained about the Twitter problems. (More Twitter stories.)