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Author Topic: Twitter shut down by denial of service attack  (Read 5943 times)

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JJ 3000

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Twitter shut down by denial of service attack
« on: August 06, 2009, 03:45:52 PM »
from:  http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/twitter-apparently-down/

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Twitter was shut down for hours Thursday morning by what it described as an “ongoing” denial-of-service attack, silencing millions of Tweeters. It was the first major outage the service has suffered in months and possibly the first ever due to sabotage. The outage appeared to begin mid-morning, EST, and affected users around the world. After about three hours, the service was coming back online in fits and starts (updated).

The first official word about the outage came in a terse statement on Twitter’s status blog: “Site is down — We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.” That was followed by a more relaxed post on the main Twitter blog by co-founder Biz Stone, which nevertheless gave no indication of how the defense was going — or how long the service might be down.

“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack,” wrote Stone. “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.”

In a denial-of-service attack, a malicious party barrages a server with so many requests that it can’t keep up, or causes it to reset. As a result, legitimate users can only access the server very slowly — or not at all, as appears to be the case here.

Not only was the site down, but client applications that depend on the Twitter API could also not connect to the service, creating a complete Twitter blackout. According to June ComScore numbers Twitter has more than 44 million registered users and its user base has been growing rapidly for months as it becomes better known in the mainstream.
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Re: Twitter shut down by denial of service attack
« Reply #1 on: August 06, 2009, 10:27:48 PM »
dear gawd... imagine the confusion when twitters everywhere need to update their sandwich counts...
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Broni


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Re: Twitter shut down by denial of service attack
« Reply #2 on: August 06, 2009, 10:55:00 PM »
Facebook was having similar problems, but on lesser scale.

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Re: Twitter shut down by denial of service attack
« Reply #3 on: August 06, 2009, 10:56:51 PM »
This just in- apparently during the DOS attack two "tweeters" had to be hospitalized for malnutrition, and one for renal failure. Apparently since they couldn't tweet about their meal they could not eat it.
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Re: Twitter shut down by denial of service attack
« Reply #4 on: August 07, 2009, 04:49:20 PM »
1 word about this: good.

People are getting so obsessed with twitter, just like facebook.

A common tweet:
"twittering on my ipod touch"
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Re: Twitter shut down by denial of service attack
« Reply #5 on: August 07, 2009, 05:17:12 PM »
How is this news?  Does anyone actually care?
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Re: Twitter shut down by denial of service attack
« Reply #6 on: August 08, 2009, 07:21:01 AM »
It should happen about 10 times a day i say...
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    Re: Twitter shut down by denial of service attack
    « Reply #8 on: August 09, 2009, 11:00:34 AM »
    Helpmeh: trying to tweet here becuz twitter sux
    Where's MagicSpeed?
    Quote from: 'matt'
    He's playing a game called IRL. Great graphics, *censored* gameplay.