[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Twitter’s vice president of Engineering, Mazen Rawashdeh, issued a somewhat formal apology for an outage that plagued the site from around 8:20am and 9:00am PT. Twitter’s ‘fail whale’,a page that is displayed instead of the regular Twitter page, when the site is overcapacity, was also absent during the outage.

The cause of the outage came from within the company’s data centers, says Twitter. Data centers are designed to be redundant: when one system fails (as everything does at one time or another), a parallel system takes over. “What was noteworthy about the current outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time,” Mr. Rawashdeh.

Twitter is investing aggressively in its technology infrastructure to avoid similar situations.