Tech & Biz

Twitter Down: Denial of Service Attack on Twitter.com

by Jordan Yerman | August 6, 2009 at 07:17 am

804 views | 57 Recommendations | 17 comments

Twitter is down at the moment, so your third party apps will be misfiring, our own Scan will be showing some weird stuff, and the Fail Whale will be lurking nearby. Updates via twitter.com are slow and sporadic. Twitter is down due to a DOS (denial of service) attack.

Twitter itself is now back up, but the Twitter DDOS means that the APIs will take some time to recover. You still have time to sip your coffee.

It’s a DDOS attack. That’s way more exciting than run of the mill outages that have plagued the site since forever.

In total, the site was down for two hours and eight minutes, said Pingdom.com, which monitors uptime and downtime for websites that include Twitter.

While long outages were common on the site two years ago, Pingdom's statistics show Thursday's outage is the longest in the past five months.

How annoying. I have a lot of testing to do this morning. [SHRUGS] I guess I'll go get a cup of coffee.

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J2B (not verified)

at 07:29 on August 6th, 2009

Twitter just came back online. Denial of Service attack! Live Journal down too and FaceBook is having serious issues. Power outage in California?

for more news on #Twitter check out TechCrunch

J2B (not verified)

at 07:33 on August 6th, 2009

Twitter still having problems with API so it may be a while before your scan is 100% back!

J2B (not verified)

at 07:41 on August 6th, 2009

oop's I think Twitter is down again?

Karl Gotthardt - albertacowpoke

at 07:50 on August 6th, 2009

Interesting problems for the techs of twitter and facebook. I guess u can't blame the tech for tower outage. FOX just reported that hackers may be to blame for twitter.

158

at 08:21 on August 6th, 2009

I very seldom go to either one.

Albert Milliron

at 08:23 on August 6th, 2009

did my comment miss somehow. here is a recommendation of a good story

Jordan Yerman

at 09:23 on August 6th, 2009

Thanks, Al! Yeah, the issue is ongoing: The site itself is recovering, but the API remains down... so (at the moment) my Scan velocity shows as 0, even though some backfill is appearing.

Suranee

at 08:29 on August 6th, 2009

Thanks for this Jordan. I've been trying to connect to twitter for the last 1 1/2 hours, but failed to do so. If I had not read your story, paranoia would have got the best of me. Some websites have been blocked in the country I live in and I was starting to think twitter was one of them!

Anti-Christ (not verified)

at 08:58 on August 6th, 2009

Hmmmmm...!

Jordan Yerman

at 13:51 on August 6th, 2009

I'm finding that Twitter's main site works in Safari and IE7, but updates aren't registering if I submit them via Firefox. APIs on my 3rd-party clients are still down.