On Thursday, popular microblogging site Twitter witnessed two service outages, with affected users from all over the world reporting significant down-time and slow service across the Twitter website as well as mobile applications. The service has now resumed for all the affected users.

According to the outages-related data provided by network analytics company Sandvine, the service disruptions had a notable effect on the North American traffic levels for Twitter. com on two occasions between 8:30 a. m. PDT
(1530 GMT) and 11:00 a. m. PDT (1800 GMT). The outages were first acknowledged by Twitter in a mid-morning blog post on Thursday.

While the two service outages - with one following the other within the course of a few hours - are speculated to be an upshot of a hacker attack, Twitter has put the blame of the disruptions on what it called a "cascading bug" in one of its infrastructure components.

About the widespread impact of the bug, Mazen Rawashdeh - Twitter's VP of engineering - said in a Thursday afternoon blog post that one of the key attributes of the bug is that it can have a considerable affect on all users worldwide --- a fact which actually made the outages the most severe glitches affecting the Twitter of late.

Revealing that the service had now resumed, Rawashdeh said that Twitter had already initiated a "comprehensive review" so that it can "avoid this chain of events in the future."