Posted on August 6, 2009 4:54 pm
When Facebook is on the blink and Twitter is down for a rainy afternoon, where does the world turn? …TechCrunch, apparently.
Twitter succumbed to a Denial of Service attack today, one which as of yet appears to be unwilling to relinquish its grip. Almost a year to the day (August 5th) since the Russians did exactly the same to Government sites in neighbouring Georgia in the lead up to the South Ossetia war, the social media giant has been felled.
Facebook and LiveJournal also went down, or at least had only partial service for much of the afternoon; leaving panicked Internet users seeking answers. As normal the first port of call appeared to have been TechCrunch. I can say this with reasonable confidence though, as they’ve now had over 400 comments on their regularly updated report on the outage.
This latest attack clearly highlights the fragility of some websites to attack. Twitter has often been seen as a site that has grown too much, too quickly; which is given some credence by the regularity with which it has temporary failures.
Unfortunately on this occasion there’s no peaceful Fail Whale to greet users, simply an error message. Let panic commence, social media has a weakness and it is still being exposed at the time of writing. With Twitter paralysed and Facebook only partially operational, it’s a social media marketer’s worst nightmare. But one that will doubtless be rectified soon, allowing millions to come forth with tweets about the great Twitter outage.
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