Twitter was down and not working following a DDoS attack. Twitter suffered a few hours of down time and is still down now for some, following a malicious attack that left users unable to even load the site at all. As a backup of course, many people tried to log into Facebook, only to find it sluggish and struggling to cope with all the people attempting some form of backup access to their social networks. Twitter used their status blog to placate their apoplexy-ridden users.
“Denial of Service Attack On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.” (via Twitter Blog)
While this isn’t entertainment news, it is the reason I turned to drink in lieu of chasing actual human company, this afternoon. Twitter is back for some and should recover fully soon. You can follow me once access is restored and see what crack addicted tweets you have totally been missing out on.
It wasn’t just Twitter, but also Facebook, LiveJournal, and a host of other social media sites.
The attack originated outside the U.S. (Mashable claims that some sources speculate it was from Russia).
On the surface, most people will consider this a minor aggravation. The deeper implications are that computer terrorism directed from one government to another may end up benefiting from this since things like these are nearly the equivalent of testing conventional weapons.
I personally believe this was a test to see just how vulnerable U.S.-based systems are, how quickly they can recover, and just how much short-term damage could be caused.
Howdy… I’ve been online pretty much the whole day. This was written this morning and so of course does not contain everything. I’m aware of which social networks were affected, ta. This post was written as it was happening and before those multiple and more detailed Mashable reports came out. I read Mashable’s latest assesments. They seem to be on the right track. But there’s no point in me updating a post like this unless an actual cause (not specualtion of the cyber-war blah blah blah) is released.
Pretty much all social networks and sharing platforms were affected in some way, including Blip and YouTube…. we shall see who is really to blame…
Oh yeah… do keep me on my toes, with your sessy reporting skills in my comment section, sugar.