Twitter was inaccessible for several hours on Thursday morning, followed by a period of slowness and sporadic time-outs (and more outright downtime). The company is blaming an “ongoing” denial-of-service attack but has not said anything further. Facebook has also confirmed that it was targeted by a DoS attack that rendered some of its features slow or non-functional.
“We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly,” Twitter’s staff posted at 6:43 a.m. PDT on the service’s status blog.
Then, around 7:49 a.m. PT, the company posted, “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack and will update status again shortly.”
Around 8:15 a.m., the status blog post was updated with “The site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.”
Twitter is pretty unstable to begin with. I wouldn’t think it would take much to overload it.
It’s hilarious that this all came on the heels of them being sued by another company who threatened to shut them down with a court order. When I saw they were shut down this morning I thought “Jesus Christ, they must know a pretty good judge.”
I blame Iran.
It’s probably the Chinese practicing Internet war.
There have been LOTS of DDOS hits…this month..
Nonsense. This is a publicity stunt.
Until Twitter, I have never seen so much PR for an Internet service other than google.
I heard about Twitter from every conceivable media outlet, every pundit, lots of organizations… The effort to promote this unoriginal service has been HUGE.
So now, they’re crying wolf and I don’t buy it. It’s just a stunt to reach anyone who hasn’t heard of them yet.
use it, its very addictive…
How did all the twats survive without their beloved Twitter?
I don’t use Twitter, other than one feed of a side story for a web comic, which I could really do without. I don’t see why I should use Twitter rather than EMail or a website. Plus, it doesn’t seem to be all that well hardened to attacks.
This wasn’t just Twitter and Facebook, LiveJournal was down at the same time. Seems somebody has it in for social networks lately.
Amster,
USA gov site, South Korea, and many USA sites have been hit in the last months. with DDOS attacks..
Sorry folks, my bad. Just an “oops!” that got out of hand is all.
DDOS = Distributed Denial of Service attack. Blitzkrieg with bits.
According to a Facebook “executive”, these attacks were of Russian instigation, aimed at muzzling one particular pro-Georgian commentator.
(http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10305200-245.html)