Q&A With Twitter’s Biggest Pest: @CascadedBug

It looks like the joke is on the Twitter bug.

Parody account @CascadedBug lived a very short life Thursday after quickly being squashed by Twitter. The account, which lasted a little over an hour, was created in the middle of a major outage on the social network.

It was then brought back to life, suspended again — and as of this writing, it's still tweeting, but the account's future is undetermined.

Although it's impressive that anyone could create a parody account in such Twitter turmoil, let alone tweet from it, the company itself was not so thrilled.

Gnawing on a few cables in Twitter's mainframe. You'll never find me, engineering nerds!

— Cascaded Bug (@CascadedBug) June 21, 2012

First I'm 'suspended,' then I'm not, then I'm 'suspended again,' now I'm not.Am I the only bug in this mainframe?

— Cascaded Bug (@CascadedBug) June 21, 2012

The pesky bug and I were in the middle of an interview during its initial shutdown. Here's how it went:

Q&A With @CascadedBug

What inspired you to start the account?

After searching Google for the phrase "Cascaded Bug," it became clear to me that there wasn't a really good definition. That, to me, meant 'cascaded bug' could be anything! I checked to see if the Twitter handle was registered — it wasn't, so I signed up for it.

What did you hope the outcome would be?

I didn't really think about that. Maybe a few people would get laughs from it. A Twitter outage can be stressful for those whose jobs, in part, depend on it. Anything to lighten the mood is usually welcomed.

How hard was it to start the account in the middle of a Twitter outage?

It wasn't hard at all — I waited until Twitter was a bit more stable.

Why did you do snack on the infrastructure?

Kernels are like aphids — they're delicious.

When you're not munching on infrastructures, what do you do?

I just moved to Twitter's new digs in San Francisco from Menlo Park. It's only 30 miles away, but for a bug, that's a LOT of flying! I've been here for a couple of days, but I've been resting while Biz and company move stuff in. Today, I was hungry, so I treated myself to a mainframe.

Why do you think you were suspended?

I guess the engineers at Twitter aren't in the mood for jokes today. It probably didn't help that I teased one of them, who posts a lot on FourSquare, that I'd just ousted him as the mayor of Twitter's servers.

Has Twitter communicated with you since the suspension?

They haven't reached out to me, but I think suspending my account was communication enough.

The human tweeting on my behalf works for a large news organization that has a pretty good relationship with the Twitter folk, so they're going to remane nameless … for now! Oh, and that stuff about hackers causing Twitter to go down? Pssh. They wish they could do what I did today.

Image courtesy of Flickr, nutmeg66