Twitter Dusts Off After Crippling Attack
A major denial-of-service attack silenced the Twitterverse.
Early
this morning, the Twitterverse was silenced by a major denial-of-service
attack. Although the service is functioning normally again, its admins are
apparently still fending off the attack.
At
about 10 AM EDT, Twitter posted the following update to its status page:
Site is down
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We
are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again
shortly.
Update:
the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from
this attack.
Co-founder
Biz Stone said in a blog post:
“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. 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.”
Twitter
has, of course, gone down plenty of times before, but it has become way more
reliable in recent months, partly because it switched its code to a programming language called Scala. Yet, this is the
first time that such a major outage has been caused by a deliberate attack.
While
it’s hard for even the biggest sites to defend against a distributed
denial-of-service attack launched by a major botnet, this certainly won’t help
Twitter’s efforts to position itself as a critical communications platform.