Oh no! Twitter is Down!
My first thought was that our networking guys had blocked my computer, not that they would do this on purpose. Although they routinely tell clients to block social sites to save time, money and headaches associated with a social networking workforce. They know the work we do so I decided to look for another answer.
It was already news. Twitter was hit with a ‘Denial-of-service’ Attack.
“Denial-of-service attacks are a common weapon employed by cyber criminals to disrupt the working of Web sites. Perpetrators enlist millions of computers to attempt to access a particular site. The site cannot handle the massive increase in traffic, and is rendered inaccessible.” - Jerry A. DiColo Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
Poor Twitter their popularity has painted a target on their back and the news is flying faster than they can respond. News stories and blogs are all reporting the outage and progress; the only comments were listed on their status page the last being, “the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack”. The web has become a source -due in part to Twitter themselves- of instant news and information. We all await the restoration with baited breath, well baited fingers. The last update said the site was back up, but when I try I get a network error.
I’m sure Twitter is working very hard to recover and can’t imagine why anyone would want to hit them. They are fairly unique in their service and if you don’t want to tweet why punish the rest of us.
Good luck guys hope to sign in soon!
Update:
This DDoS attack seams to be hitting social networking pretty hard both Facebook and Live Journal report being attacked today!
Status pages everywhere are being booked marked as users are trying to find out what’s going on.