Twitter Tanks on Thursday Morning

Facebook Twitter Serious Outage Cuts Off Users Of Popular Social Networking Platform; Facebook Also Experiences Glitches..

by CNET

Published: Thu, August 06, 2009 - 10:05 am CST Last Updated: Thu, August 06, 2009 - 11:10 am CST

12:10 p.m.

Twitter Service Status Blog
As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.

11:05 a.m.
(CNET) By CNET Staff Writer Caroline McCarthy

Twitter was inaccessible for several hours on Thursday morning, followed by a period of slowness and sporadic timeouts (and more outright downtime). The company is blaming an "ongoing" denial-of-service (DOS) attack but has not said anything further.

Judging by the timeline of my TweetDeck client, it looks like the problems started right around 6:00 a.m. PDT.

"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."

Way back when, Twitter outages were so commonplace that it was worth reporting when it didn't crash--as when it stayed afloat during the entire South by Southwest Interactive Festival in 2008. Now, a few million dollars of venture capital later, the service is far more stable.

This is problematic, because Twitter wants to establish itself as a communications standard rather than just a social-media brand. It's been a crucial platform for information exchange in the face of global events where more traditional means of broadcasting have been inaccessible or blocked.

Some features of Facebook were also experiencing uptime issues on Thursday--one reader speculated that login servers may have been down--which raises the issue of whether a hosting company problem is to blame. Alternately, a denial-of-service attack could have been targeting both high-profile companies.

Facebook is "looking into" the outages, spokeswoman Brandee Barker said in an e-mail.

A denial-of-service attack occurs when hackers overload a Web service's infrastructure with data, making its servers slow to a crawl or crash altogether.

There have been a notable number of DOS attacks recently in the social-media space: On Wednesday, URL shortener Tr.im claims that one such attack rendered its truncated URLs inaccessible for some time; earlier in the week, blog network Gawker Media was downed by an attack that targeted The Consumerist, a property that it recently sold but still hosts on its servers.

There has been no indication that any of these various attacks are connecte. But it's probably not a coincidence that they all coincide with the annual Defcon hacker convention.

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