Twitter Down – Malicious Attack Cause Social Media Site To Blackout

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Twitter is down, the site has lengthened its downtime; over the last few hours Twitter has disclosed that it’s fighting against a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS).

Twitter has been a lot more stable this year than it has been in the past. Twitter has indicated the status of its downtime on its blog, but also stated that it is not certain of the cause. They later indicated that it was a Distributed Denial of Service Attack. Knowing that this is a malicious attack may remove some of the heat from Twitter to some extent but it might be assumed by some individuals that the site is failing to scale properly. DDoS attacks are hard to fight off even for well successful sites.

With a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS), a malicious party barrages on a host with numerous requests so that the server can’t keep abreast, or causes it to reset. Therefore, real users can rarely access the server or in Twitters case not at all.

Not only was the site down, but applications that uses the Twitter API cannot connect to the service as well, creating a full-scale Twitter blackout.

Who might have done this to Twitter? That’s the question on everyone’s mind because it can be anyone.

Author
Francine Byfield