Was Twitter Downed By Denial Of Service Attack?
Following an denial of service attack on Thursday morning, Twitter is back online. Twitter was unavailable early Thursday morning due to a denial of service attack. In a blog post, presumably hosted on an unaffected server, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone acknowledged the 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,” he said. “We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.” denial of service attack involves bombarding a Web site or server with more traffic than it can handle, effectively causing online gridlock. Often such attacks are distributed, meaning that multiple computers, usually compromised by malware, send data to the target site in unison. Twitter was knocked offline about 9:15 a.m. EDT. Pingdom, a site that tracks server up
Twitter was inaccessible for several hours on Thursday morning, followed by a period of slowness and sporadic time-outs (and more outright downtime). The company is blaming an “ongoing” denial-of-service attack but has not said anything further. Facebook has also confirmed that it was targeted by a DOS attack that rendered some of its features slow or non-functional. Judging by the timeline of my TweetDeck client, it looks like the problems started right around 6 a.m. PDT. “We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly,” Twitter’s staff posted at 6:43 a.m. PDT on the service’s status blog. Then, around 7:49 a.m. PT, the company posted, “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack and will update status again shortly.” Around 8:15 a.m., the status blog post was updated with “The site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.” (I still was unable to access Twitter.) Perfomance monitoring firm AlertSite says that Twitter’s
A denial of service attack involves bombarding a Web site or server with more traffic than it can handle, effectively causing online gridlock. … Sources: googel.
