Twitterless !
August 6th, 2009
Earlier today, after posting the latest winner of The Blog Of The Day Award (Congratulations Karen !), I logged on to twitter to alert all BOTD followers. Except that … I couldn’t !
As is well documented by now, today twitter was the subject of what seems to have been a “distributed denial of service” attack on its servers.
Result ? Apparently, London ground to a halt !
Not ! I say that in jest because it was also reported yesterday that London has more twitter users than any other city in the world !
But no – we all had to learn how to communicate ordinarily again. (Shock horror !) Well, I have only been twittering for a few weeks, so it wasn’t too hard to re-adjust. If you’re interested in a technical analysis, I recommend Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols excellent “cyber cynic” blog.
If you find it a bit heavy on the technical analysis, (and he does mention one or two conspiracy theories too), there is an important bottom line to his piece.
And that is that these DDoS attacks come from “botnets” set up on PCs, both domestic and commerical, that have been infected by viruses.
The moral of this story ? Make sure that your PC is regularly screened for nasty stuff like viruses and other malware.
Not only will you benefit, so will the rest of us ! At least those that “can’t live” without twitter 
Categories: General
Hi Roger,
I was amazed when I heard that Twitter was hacked. I wonder if it will do any harm to people going there?? I also heard from numerous people that they get a lot of spams from people they follow and they have to start deleting them.
Huddson
Interesting thought Huddson – I have read that the growth of Twitter has kind of caught its owners by surprise and that their IT infrastructure was under pressure anyway. From what I have read, a DDoS attack is designed to just overload it. I’m sure that the owners will be looking to beef things up asap.
As for spam, I agree – I seem to be following one guy that has blasted my timeline several times already today. A real turn-off.