Twitter hit by technical fault on eve of Olympics

The site attracts huge audiences during sporting events

Parts of Twitter became inaccessible a day before thousands of fans are expected to start tweeting about the Olympic Games.

The Twitter.com site was unreachable for almost an hour, and continued to suffer intermittent faults thereafter.

<link> <caption>In a status message posted after the fault was cleared</caption> <url href="http://blog.twitter.com/2012/07/our-apologies-for-todays-outage.html" platform="highweb"/> </link> , the micro-blogging service apologised for the problems.

It said it was caused by a simultaneous failure in its main data centre and the one supposed to provide back-up.

Twitter said it was investing heavily in its data centres to avoid such falling victim to another "infrastructural double-whammy".

During the interruption, Twitter was still accessible via its mobile site and other applications.

Twitter is expected to be one of the main social networks to be used by both fans and athletes during the Games.

Reliability and stability

Sporting events regularly attract the service's biggest audience.

During Spain's Euro 2012 win, there were over 15,000 tweets every second.

For London 2012, there are over 2,000 verified Olympians - past and present - that are signed up to use the service.

Downtime plagued Twitter during its early years, but subsequent investment meant the site has become more reliable.

Last month, Twitter blamed a "cascading bug" for causing "turbulence" on the service which made the site slow or inaccessible for about two hours.

At the time, Mazen Rawashdeh, the site's vice president of engineering, apologised to users but praised the site's recent reliability record.

"For the past six months, we've enjoyed our highest marks for site reliability and stability ever: at least 99.96% and often 99.99%.

"In simpler terms, this means that in an average 24-hour period, twitter.com has been stable and available to everyone for roughly 23 hours, 59 minutes and 40-ish seconds."