August 6th, 2009
Twitter and Facebook Hit by DDoS Attack
Social media giants Twitter and Facebook have been hit this morning with a denial of service attack (DDoS). The Facebook site remained up during this time (but went down to limited service) while Twitter took a downfall and went completely offline for hours as they reeled from the attack.
I’ve seen a number of great posts about these attacks that I wanted to share. Take a look at this blog post by Barrett Lyon on the security aspects of this attack on Twitter: http://www.blyon.com/blog/index.php/2009/08/06/twitter-down-due-to-ddos/
Here’s another by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols that provides another look into this issue – and outlines one possible motive for the reasons behind this attack: http://blogs.computerworld.com/14504/how_twitter_was_killed
CNN had a good overview post on what is happening with this attack: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/06/twitter.attack/index.html
As the recovery effort on Twitter’s side continues, they will be posting out updates to their status blog: http://status.twitter.com/
I, for one, am feeling a little lost this morning as one of my major communication hubs goes down.
- Jonathan LeBlanc
