'Human error' to blame for Twitter link shortener's downtime

For 40 minutes this week, many Twitter users were left in a bind after a problem with Twitter's t.co link shortener would not work, a tech site reported Tuesday.

 

During the outage, Twitter users could read tweets but not follow links following a case of "human error," CNET reported.

 

"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," CNET quoted a spokesman for Melbourne IT, a domain name registrar that Twitter uses for t.co.

 

The CNET report said the error, which happened at about 11:30 Pacific time involved a hosting firm based in Melbourne, Australia responding to an abuse complaint.

 

Since t.co was a central domain used by Twitter, this meant millions of Twitter users received "non-existent domain" errors when they tried to follow links using t.co.

 

CNET said the problem appeared at first to be with 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 it said Dyn's chief scientist Tom Daly said it was "an issue with the upstream parent zone, .co, the country code domain for Colombia."

 

A spokeswoman for .CO Internet said that the t.co domain "did appear to be put on ClientHold status," something that registrars have the ability to do, "meaning that the domain was removed from the zone during that time period."

 

"In the rarefied world of people who keep the domain name system humming along, ClientHold is a special status usually reserved for customers who don't pay their bills on time. An Internet standard known as RFC 5731 specifies that if a domain falls into ClientHold status, connectivity 'information MUST NOT be published," meaning it becomes unreachable,'" CNET said.

 

CNET also quoted Melbourne IT's spokesman, Tony Smith, as saying in an e-mail that Melbourne IT's domain policy team is investigating requests from registries and the public about potential abuse of domains (including phishing sites) registered via Melbourne IT or its resellers.

 

"We take each request seriously and if our investigations show that there is clear evidence of phishing or malware we can shut the domain down to protect consumers... We have been in contact with Twitter, and are reviewing our investigation and verification processes," it quoted Smith as saying.

 

Meanwhile, CNET said a Twitter representative declined to respond to questions, saying "the issue was resolved last night."

 

Fragile web

 

CNET said that while the problem may be considered a hiccup, it may have peeved users in Asia and Australia instead of those in America and most of Europe.

 

"But the outage demonstrates the fragility of complex systems. It's a little like a recent outage in California that affected another single point of failure: Electricity failing at a single refinery caused gasoline prices to jump to, in some areas, over $5," it said.

 

Workaround

 

CNET suggested a workaround if t.co goes down again: "You can replace a dot or period in a link with its HTML entity equivalent (in this case, .) and Twitter will display the link without shortening it — at least for now." — TJD, GMA News