It wasn't the Olympics that caused Twitter to crash for about two hours beginning at 8:20 a.m. PT Thursday. The microblogging site issued an apology and explanation later in the day, citing a failure within the company's data center. "When one system fails (as everything does at one time or another), a parallel system takes over. What was noteworthy about today's outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time," the statement said. "We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future." The widespread outage was the second in a little more than a month that the service went down. Also Thursday, an outage hit Google's chatting services Google Talk for five hours.
