Many Twitter users were in a state of panic when the popular micro-blogging service experienced one of the longest crash in the site's history.

The Twitter outage started around 11:59 a.m. ET but the service returned around 1 p.m. but after an hour, the sites crashed down again. A spokesperson from Twitter announced the site problem stating "Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue." Around 1:42 p.m., Twitter updated their blog writing down that "the issue has been resolved and all services are currently operational". Despite that assurance, Twitter again updated its blog post saying that the "issue is on-going". After an hour after the update was posted, Twitter service was almost back to normal for most users. 

Many people panicked when UGNazi, a hacker group claimed responsibility for the Twitter crash due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS attack. Twitter denied this claim and instead provided an explanation for this crash. Mazen Rawashdeh, the VP of Engineering for Twitter wrote a blog post explaining the reason for the crash. Here is what he wrote:

"Not how we wanted today to go. At approximately 9 a.m. PDT, we discovered that Twitter was inaccessible for all Web users, and mobile clients were not showing new tweets. We immediately began to investigate the issue and found that there was a cascading bug in one of our infrastructure components. This wasn't due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today."

As mentioned, many people were in a state of panic and immediately discussed the Twitter situation once the site was up. There are people who expressed their despair about the situation through other social networking sites like Facebook and Tumblr. Other people utilized this as a chance to withdraw from their Twitter addiction prompting them not to use Twitter in every chance they get.

This is not the first time Twitter experienced this kind of crash in their site but so far, the latest crash is the longest one in Twitter's history. There are currently 140 million active users of Twitter that generates at least 340 million Tweets per day.

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