Twitter under denial-of-service attack

Jake Widman
Thursday, 06 August 2009 22:33

Business IT - Technology

A little after 9 AM Thursday Eastern Daylight Time, social network Twitter was brought down by a denial-of-service attack. It was up about two hours later, but the operators are still battling the attack. First reports of the outage began to spread through security websites a few minutes after the popular network went down.

About an hour and a half the Twitter status page confirmed that "we are defending against a denial-of-service attack."

Shortly after that, the network was back up but still experiencing problems as the attack continued.

Twitter cofounder Biz Stone managed to get a tweet out about 2 hours after the attack started, saying, "We had a lot of things we'd rather be doing this morning, defending against a DoS wasn't one of them."

A little over three hours after the network went down, the status page warned, "As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients."

The effects of the outage spread beyond Twitter itself.

For more on Twitter's outage, see Page 2.