Being Cheryl: Columbus Social Media and Random Humor

Wondering why Twitter went down around 9am EST and hasn’t come back, with no warning of scheduled maintenance and not even the familiar fail whale to greet you?

Twitter just posted this to their blog a few minutes ago:

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. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.

From Wikipedia:

A “denial-of-service” attack is characterized by an explicit attempt by attackers to prevent legitimate users of a service from using that service. Attacks can be directed at any network device, including attacks on routing devices and web, electronic mail, or Domain Name System servers.

A DoS attack can be perpetrated in a number of ways. The five basic types of attack are:

1. Consumption of computational resources, such as bandwidth, disk space, or processor time
2. Disruption of configuration information, such as routing information.
3. Disruption of state information, such as unsolicited resetting of TCP sessions.
4. Disruption of physical network components.
5. Obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

Facebook is also experiencing problems, possibly from a rush of Twitter traffic. Or maybe simultaneous attacks?

UPDATE: Twitter JUST updated their status blog, announcing the site is back (it still won’t load for me) but the attack is ongoing:

UPDATE 2: The site is now back up, after two+ hours, and moving pretty slowly. I’m still getting lots of network errors and page load fails on Facebook.

UPDATE 3: Apparently the Facebook slowdown WASN’T merely a result of Twitter traffic moving there – according to Mashable, Facebook had it’s OWN DoS attack. Wow.