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 11.30pm 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 realised and rectified in approximately 40 minutes and t.co links again began working
— via redwolf.newsvine.com