Microblog service Twitter has officially been down since around 10:00 a.m. today, preventing the tweets of millions of users around the globe. The official Twitter Status blog has published the following update:
Defending against a denial-of-service attack?! Let the battle begin! Time to summon the all-mighty Fail Whale to wage war against the cyber foes. Fortunately, the federal government has the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team to step in if needed.
So what exactly is a denial-of-service (DoS) attack? According to US-CERT:
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In a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, an attacker attempts to prevent legitimate users from accessing information or services. By targeting your computer and its network connection, or the computers and network of the sites you are trying to use, an attacker may be able to prevent you from accessing email, web sites, online accounts (banking, etc.), or other services that rely on the affected computer.
The most common and obvious type of DoS attack occurs when an attacker "floods" a network with information. When you type a URL for a particular web site into your browser, you are sending a request to that site's computer server to view the page. The server can only process a certain number of requests at once, so if an attacker overloads the server with requests, it can't process your request. This is a "denial of service" because you can't access that site.
An attacker can use spam email messages to launch a similar attack on your email account. Whether you have an email account supplied by your employer or one available through a free service such as Yahoo or Hotmail, you are assigned a specific quota, which limits the amount of data you can have in your account at any given time. By sending many, or large, email messages to the account, an attacker can consume your quota, preventing you from receiving legitimate messages.
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If you are already shaking from the inability to access your home page, calm down. Although this is a longer downtime than Twitter has experienced for a year or so, it has happened before. The larger the Twitter network becomes, the more computers get involved, the more likely an attack of this nature becomes. For a more in-depth explanation of this situation and how it is orchestrated by hackers, click here.
The question is this: what do we do when a major social media service breaks down for an extended period of time? What will be an interesting case study is to examine where people are turning in the wake of Twitter failure. Facebook is my first guess. Other ideas welcome!
2 reactions:
That was my first thought exactly when I found out Twitter was down. It was something like: "Whelp, guess this is going to push everyone over to Facebook for the day." I almost logged on to Facebook, myself, but my love for the site has so waned in the past year that I couldn't convince myself it was even worth it. I'd get to Facebook intending just to update my status and two hours later would snap to my senses while looking at my freshman year hallmate's "Which Letter People Are You?" Quiz results. No, thank you.
Found it humorous that many people's "just-after-recovery" tweets (including my own) were regarding how productive they were while Twitter was down. That's pretty telling about or Tweet to Work ratio patterns.
Twitter is back up and life goes on.
...and if Twitter goes down again, there's always FriendFeed!