We were not really aware of our reliance on social media. Not really, until yesterday’s Twitter outage hit and we were unable to view or post on the service. Then it suddenly felt as though a hand had been lopped off. We don’t think we were alone.

As to the cause of the outage, which spread its productivity-increasing tendrils around the world to Africa, Europe, North America, and the Middle East, Twitter has an explanation for it. The outage came about as a result of a borked software update. Once Twitter rolled back the changes, service resumed as normal. More or less, as it took some time to undo the changes the broken update caused..

Twitter’s blackout was far from global, with people continuing to post to the service with the #twitterdown hashtag – which trended, obviously.

The outage lasted around 10 hours, all told, though South Africa wasn’t affected for the whole period. Intermittent reports of outages continued until about 18:00 yesterday. Happily, service at the Stuff offices resumed around 14:00. Worst three hours ever…

Source: Reuters