A hacker attack shut down the fast-growing messaging service for hours yesterday
A hacker attack shut down the fast-growing messaging service for hours yesterday
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Twitter said in its status blog yesterday morning it was "defending against a denial-of-service attack," in which hackers command scores of computers to a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through.
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Out of Touch: For Twitter users, the outage meant no Tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down. |
For Twitter users, the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down.
"I had to Google search Twitter to find out what was going on, when normally my Twitter feed gives me all the breaking news I need," said Alison Koski, a New York public-relations manager. She added she felt "completely lost" without Twitter.
The Twitter outage lasted a few hours.
Facebook, whose users encountered intermittent problems yesterday, was also the subject of a denial-of-service attack, though it was not known whether the same hackers were involved.
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Unlike Twitter, Facebook never became completely inaccessible. Facebook said no user information was at risk.
This was not the first and likely not the last outage for Twitter.
In addition to planned maintenance outages, overcapacity can cripple Web sites, especially such fast-growing ones as Twitter and Facebook.
In fact, service outage on Twitter once were so common that management began posting a "Fail Whale" logo on the site to signal when the service was down. The logo featured a whale being hoisted above the water by a flock of birds.
Millions of Twitter users aren't familiar with the three-year-old service's history of frequent outages because they began tweeting in the past six months, around the same time that the San Francisco-based company was spending more money to increase its computing power and reduce the disruptions.
With the added capacity, the Fail Whale rarely surfaces any more.
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