Simple Human Error in Australia Causes Twitter Link Problems Worldwide

Melbourne IT, the domain registrar of the t.co link of Twitter, inadvertently placed the domain on hold on October 8, 2012, causing the shortening service to go offline. All links were immediately shortened by the social micro-blogging site starting 4:32 pm, Australian Eastern Standard Time. The outage lasted 40 minutes, according to The Next Web. The domain was noticeably offline based on a CNET report showing that the user error stemmed from Melbourne IT. The Australian firm's spokesman told iTnews that the mistake happened while the group was going through a phishing investigation. The spokesman said: ?Melbourne IT?s domain policy team is active in investigating requests from registries and the public about potential abuse of domains (including phishing sites) registered via Melbourne IT or its resellers.? The effect of the outage was broken hyperlinks on Twitter at around 11:30 pm due to the simple human mistake at the hosting firm in Melbourne, Australia. The company was allegedly fixing an abuse complaint. In the past year, Twitter started to abbreviate all existing hyperlinks via the t.co domain name. One of the drawbacks include having a central point of failure which was not present before. When the outage occurred, millions of Twitter users had non-existent domain problems whenever they clicked on links. Dyn was initially suspected to be the cause of the problem. Dyn provides connectivity to the domain name system on Twitter. The spokesman said: ?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.? He added: ?Yesterday in the process of auctioning a phishing complaint, our policy team inadvertently placed the t.co domain on hold.? According to the phishing investigator?s spokesman, the company has been keeping in touch with Twitter to resolve questionable activity. Melbourne IT is currently checking the processes concerning verification and investigation. The spokesman said that the error was immediately discovered and then fixed in about 40 minutes, so the t.co shortening service links started functioning again thereafter. Twitter only gave a short comment regarding the temporary outage. The social media site confirmed the outage lasting 40 minutes and then indicated how the problem has been fixed.