Twitter was down by DDoS Attack

Old status Twitter:
http://status.twitter.com/post/60320780/twitter-is-down

The popular microblogging site Twitter went down early Thursday morning, with the site's operators confirming the outage on a status blog as a denial-of-service attack.

Twitter originally offered no explanation for the outage, adding a characteristically pithy post on its Status blog titled, simply, "Site is Down". "We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly," the post read.

Shortly thereafter, however, the site confirmed that it was suffering a denial-of-service attack. "We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly," the site read. At about 11:21 AM EDT, Twitter reported that the site was back up, although PCMag.com staffers still couldn't access it.

"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack," Twitter chief executive Biz Stone said in a blog post. "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."

PCMag.com staffers also noted problems with Facebook early Thursday, with the site failing to load briefly. The status site "downforeveryoneorjustme.com" also reported both Twitter and Facebook being down at about 9:45 AM Eastern time. Facebook was accessible shortly thereafter, although PCMag.com staffers reported a few glitches, such as problems with posting status updates and internal links.

"We're looking into it and will give you an update as soon as possible," a Facebook representative said via email.

LiveJournal also experienced a brief outage, but seemed to otherwise be operating normally.
The Twitter attack followed a similar DDoS attack earlier in the week. Sites operated by Gawker Media crashed on Monday, later believed to be the result of a DDoS attack against The Consumerist blog, which is owned by Consumers Union but whose content is hosted by Gawker Media.

Other article:
Scattered reports of users being forced to communicate with people in physical proximity such as co-workers, friends and neighbors are coming in as some popular social networking sites are suffering varying degrees of outage.

Mashable is reporting that Twitter’s downtime this morning is due to a DDoS attack of unknown origin. Twitter’s been heavily criticized for its relatively frequent outages, and any Twitter user knows the ubiquitous fail whale, a mascot that appears when there are too many tweets!

Twitter’s off the hook this morning, though, as DDoS attacks can be a real pain in the ass to fight. As we reported this earlier this week, the Gawker Media blog network and former Gawker blog Consumerist suffered intermittent outages for the better part of a day due to a DDoS attack against Consumerist. And what exactly is a DDoS attack? It’s an abbreviation for “distributed denial of service” and occurs when jerks or jerk-offs unknown interrupt the flow of information to and from a website by flooding the target with a huge number of requests. The site can’t separate legitimate requests from the attack hits and essentially goes into a corner, curls up in a ball and cries.

So, users did what anyone would do in the absence of Twitter- they ran to Facebook to cry about it. And the subsequent flow of users to Facebook has in turn slowed that service. Cyber gardens are going unweeded, virtual deer unfed and friends uninformed about your favorite ACTOR/ICE CREAM/HOT KICKS/JONAS BROTHERS SONG/SEX TOY RiGHt NoW!!! as Facebook struggles to accommodate the people who can’t tweet for the time being.

How have you been spending your status update free morning. What are YOU doing right now?

Read more: http://www.inquisitr.com/32233/twitter-hit-with-ddos-attack-facebook-slow-people-forced-to-talk-to-those-around-them/#ixzz0NaA075Wf



Enjoy, XyLeM