Twitter blames 'system failures' for 'site crash' on Olympics eve

London, July 27 (ANI): Micro-blogging website Twitter has blamed systems failures after the social site reportedly crashed due to heavy traffic and unidentified problems on the eve of London 2012 Olympics.

"I wish I could say that today's outage could be explained by the Olympics or even a cascading bug. Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy," The Daily Telegraph quoted Mazen Rawashdeh, Vice President of engineering, as saying in a statement.

He also apologised for giving its users "zilch" instead of the service, and said that the company is "investing aggressively" in its systems to avoid a repeat situation.

Over millions of people across the world were unable to access the site for more than an hour, after the problems were first reported at 4.30 p.m., but services were largely restored by 5.15 p.m.

Users who incurred the problem on Thursday were greeted with a half-formed message saying that "Twitter is currently down" and the fields where a reason for the outage and a deadline for service restoration should have been were filled with computer code. The San Francisco-based company said the outage was caused by a "noteworthy" double failure in its data centers, when two its systems coincidentally stopped working at around the same time.

Last month Twitter had faced a similar problem, for which it blamed a "cascading bug" that drove frustrated users to other social media sites to complain. (ANI)