Twitter goes down in apparent denial of service attack

By Tim Conneally | Published August 6, 2009, 12:35 PM

Twitter, the popular and ubiquitous (as long as you're over 25) microblogging service was down for several hours on Thursday.

"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," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in the site's official blog today.

The outage began at around 8:00 am EDT, and continued until around 11:00 am, when the Twitter Status Blog was updated to say, "Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack."

The site is still difficult to reach, but has returned to a more stable state. Expectedly, the top trending topics on the freshly-restored site include "DDoS," "Denial-of-Service," "Twitter Status," and the names of several Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, and UberTwitter which were also unresponsive this morning.

Comments

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Back up great I can go to work now..

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Twitter seems to be back up for those who wanted to know (it does have some intermittent interruptions but it's few and far between anyway).

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so it's that easy... simple DDOS.. ok.. I will move over to Google Apps now..

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oh no you can't see what your friends are doing every second what will they do LOL

twitter is the biggest waste of bandwidth on the net and face book and my space are a close 2nd and 3rd

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Because communication and socialization are totally unnecessary? ;)

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Facebook is handy for arranging get togethers, but other than that useless. Twitter is useful to arrange get togethers right there and then if someone's in the area. Other than that it's useless.

Basically, if you have no friends, both services are useless, but have limited use in certain areas.

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Sounds like you spend way too much time behind a computer :)
I use Facebook and consider it to be a fun toy, for socialization etc. I actually get together with people in real life and hang out.

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"biggest waste of bandwidth on the net"

"I use Facebook"

Cute...

Chatting with folks who are no longer within "get together" distance is *far* from useless...IMO. ..and as Paul stated, the invite system is Excellent for getting folks together to see Carrie's favorite band playing, or to see Mol in her musical. ;)

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I got a lot of work done because of the outage on Twitter. I got 12 press releases submitted for my new site:
http://www.Aggressive-Affiliates.com
and now I am working on some followup for http://5DayBusinessChallenge.com
before I finally log in and check the tweetdeck!

Thanks for the news!

Micheal

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I smell spammer.

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on another note, useful tools so that you can check if a site is likely dead or if its just you and your s***ty ISP or their dns servers AND you don't need to wait on anybody to report whats up
http://dnstools.com/
http://www.dnswatch.info/
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
http://www.dnsstuff.com/

anyone with anything to add?

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http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com is rather splendid and occasionally comes in handy with Dreamhost's patchy service.

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