Twitter Hit By Denial of Service Attack

Aug 06, 2009 - By Jared Newman

twitter fail whale Twitter Hit By Denial of Service Attack

If you tried to hit up Twitter some time in the last couple of hours, you probably got a friendly note from your Web browser saying that it’s not happening. It turns out, the social messaging site was hit by a denial of service attack this morning — that is, an external attack meant to prevent people from accessing a site. Often, these attacks bombard a Web site with communications requests, making it difficult or impossible for users to get through. Twitter’s back up now, but it seems the attack is ongoing. Twitter’s status blog merely says that “we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.” It’s just a couple hours without Twitter, but it’s frightening that this can just happen out of the blue. [Twitter via Wired]

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COMMENTS

  1. Posted by Lee
    Thursday, August 6, 2009 3:57PM

    I think it's happening to facebook too… it's been non-stop weird and slow today.

  2. Posted by Is Facebook Down as Well? Twitter DoS Attack Weighs on Facebook
    Thursday, August 6, 2009 11:42AM

    [...] Facebook Down?  The denial of service attack that brought down twitter this morning may have aimed its sights on Facebook as well.  While tests conducted on our end [...]

  3. Posted by Australian Malware Creator Busted, Infected 3,000 Computers
    Thursday, August 13, 2009 11:24AM

    [...] bombarded computer systems with denial of service attacks — the same kind of attacks that brought down Twitter and Facebook last week. You can’t argue that these are crimes of passion, so if this guy is [...]

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