Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Twitter suffers global outage

Twitter went down Tuesday morning on the 19th January, UK time, and became inaccessible for users around the globe. The site apparently suffered a total outage with access to the service failing on the web, mobile and its API [application programming interface, the system that applications use to speak to the Twitter service] at 08:20 GMT. Users received error messages warning the network was both "over capacity" and suffering an "internal error".

Twitter's own status board updated at 09:00, confirmed the outage, and the company's developer-facing monitoring confirmed that four of the five public APIs were down, suffering a "service disruption". At 08:47, the search API was upgraded to "performance issues". By 08:55, a second API was upgraded to "performance issues", and some users were able to sporadically access the service.

The company initially confirmed the outage by, somehow, tweeting, from its @support account. The tweet could not be seen however because Twitter was down. Twitter emailed the text of the tweet to news outlets, which read: "Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution."

The service was still down at 09:30 at the time of posting this article.

Update: Twitter became accessible for most users within two hours. However the downtime seriously affected the company's credibility and its stocks slumped to an all time low, falling some 8.4% to $16.43 on Tuesday, well below the price of $26 at its November 2013 initial public offering.

“The issue was related to an internal code change,” Twitter said later on its website. “We reverted the change, which fixed the issue.”

[BBC / BloombergGuardian / Telegraph / Daily MailExpressIBT / Inc]

tvnewswatch, London, UK

Thursday, January 07, 2016

Terror suspect with fake suicide belt shot dead in Paris

French police have shot dead a man who entered a police station with a knife whilst wearing a fake explosive device. The incident has once again shaken Paris and comes on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks which left 17 dead.

Only minutes before the attack President François Hollande had praised police in a speech commemorating the Paris killings in which gunmen murdered 17 people in a series of attacks at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices and a Jewish supermarket.

In his address, Hollande said 5,000 extra police and gendarmes would be added to existing forces by 2017 in an "unprecedented" strengthening of French security.

In the shadow of the Sacré-Cœur

Thursday's attack occurred at a police station in Goutte d'Or in the 18th arrondissement of Paris not too far from the iconic Sacré-Cœur Basilica.

One witness, who was around 50 metres from the police station, told the French news station FRANCE 24 that he clearly heard the man cry "Allahu Akbar" [الله أكبر] - God is great - as he rushed toward the police station.

Pictures posted on Twitter showed the alleged assailant wearing a camouflage coat, lying on the pavement after being shot. A police bomb disposal robot appeared to be inspecting the body.

Meanwhile much of the area was locked down as police carried out investigations.

The attacker, who was carrying a mobile phone and a sheet of paper showing the black flag of ISIL, was later identified as Sallah Ali, a 20-year-old Moroccan with previous convictions for theft.

Paris in shock, again

Paris has been rocked by two series of attacks in the last year. Last January's Charlie Hebdo attacks left the city in shock and 17 dead [Wikipedia / tvnewswatch: Barbarism in Paris leaves 12 dead at Charlie Hebdo office]. Then in November last year, 130 were killed and dozens of others were injured in a series of coordinated attacks in the French capital [Wikipedia / tvnewswatch: A night of terror on the streets of Paris]   .

Reports: BBC / Sky News / CNN / France24

tvnewswatch, London, UK