Twitter hit by denial of service attack
[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/TECH/08/06/twitter.attack/t1home.twitter.jpg]
John D. Sutter
CNN
An attack on the social networking site Twitter shut the site down for about two hours on Thursday morning, causing headaches in the online community and glitches in other Web sites like Facebook.
In an e-mail to CNN.com, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the site was hit with a "denial of service attack," or an attempt to shut the site down by overwhelming it with traffic.
"There's no indication that this attack is related to any previous activities. We are currently the target of a denial of service attack," Stone said in the e-mail.
"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 defend and later investigate."
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Filed under: Twitter |
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So Twitter was brought to its knees by a denial of service attack? I would have thought that an application growing like Twitter would have already had resolutions in place to deal with and prevent these attacks. They probably need to look at what other back doors the original software developers inadvertantly left in there......or they will continue to have problems. People doing this sort of thing are not ones to duck and run – they enjoy tormenting a site.
Ill-intentioned persons performing this type of attack in order to overload a service, to get her off the air.
A DDoS attack is usually difficult to circumvent because the requests usually come from several different computers, and this way multiple computers send requests to connect repeatedly, causing overload.
What irritates is that while some are working (and today in the Twitter is a tool of communication), others are causing inconvenience to people.
Oh so that is what that was this morning! I thought I had done something wrong like punching a perfectly wrong button or something, which is what I am apt to do anyhow. I did finally get mine straightened out , but it took a while. So someone there at CNN is looking into this and will maybe be able to tell us why this happened? Thank you!
Donna Wood
Lexington, Tennessee