Social networking giant, Twitter has said that double failure in its data centers was the reason behind a service outage on Thursday that prevented users from around the world from accessing their accounts on the micro blogging website.

The company said that when one its system failed, another one was expected to take over and avoid a disruption, however, two systems simultaneously failed on Thursday causing the outage of the service. Even as the company blamed the failures in its data centers, many suspected that the outage was caused by heavy rush of users on the site ahead of the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic games.

"I wish I could say that today's outage could be explained by the Olympics or even a cascading bug. Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy,” said Mazen Rawashdeh, VP of engineering in a statement. He apologized for giving its users "zilch" instead of the service.

Users, who tried to access the site on Thursday, received a message saying that "Twitter is currently down." Sluggishness or outages were reported from countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa while some users were able to post updates through third party apps.

Mr. Rawashdeh also said that the company is investing in its infrastructure in order to avoid a repetition of the outage in its services.