During last night's outage, Twitter users could read tweets but not follow links, thanks to a problem with the company's t.co link shortener caused by human error.
An outage that broke hyperlinks on Twitter yesterday evening originated with a simple human error at a Melbourne, Australia-based hosting firm that was responding to an abuse complaint, CNET has learned.
Twitter last year began to abbreviate all hyperlinks using its t.co domain name -- which had the side effect of introducing a central point of failure where none existed before. That failure happened last night around 11:30 p.m. PT when t.co went offline, meaning millions of Twitter users received "non-existent domain" errors when trying to follow links.
A spokesman for Melbourne IT, a domain name registrar which Twitter uses for t.co, told CNET this afternoon that: "Yesterday in the process of actioning a phishing complaint, our policy team inadvertently placed the t.co domain on hold. The error was realized and rectified in approximately 40 minutes and t.co links again began working."
At first, it seemed as though the problem was caused by Dyn, a New Hampshire-based company that provides domain name system connectivity for Twitter's t.co link shorting service as well as Zappos and Etsy. But Tom Daly, Dyn's chief scientist, said it was "an issue with the upstream parent zone, .co, the... [Read more]
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