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

    By Christine Erickson | Mashable – Thu, Jun 21, 2012

    It looks like the joke is on the Twitter bug.

    [More from Mashable: Twitter-Breaking Bug Parody Account Gets Suspended [UPDATED]]

    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.

    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. The account was suspended about as fast as it was created.

    [More from Mashable: Twitter’s Outage Is Its Biggest in 8 Months]

    The pesky bug and I were in the middle of an interview during its 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

    This story originally published on Mashable here.

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