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Twitter suffers sustained outage in hacker attack (reuters.com)
14 points by hornokplease on June 21, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments



HED doesn't tell the whole story - in the article an unidentified security expert is quoted:

One security professional said the group probably used a DDoS-for-hire site to launch an attack against Twitter on Tuesday, but downplayed the likelihood the group was solely responsible for bringing down the social media network.


One security professional said the group probably used a DDoS-for-hire site to launch an attack against Twitter on Tuesday, but downplayed the likelihood the group was solely responsible for bringing down the social media network.

"It was mere coincidence," the security professional said. "The backend of Twitter is having issues, which is unrelated to the very small attack."

More like "Twitter suffers sustained outage coincidentally during hacker attack"


...its most dedicated users...had nowhere to complain about the interruption.

Amusing, but poignant: We go to Twitter when something is down or an earthquake happens, but where do we go when Twitter itself is down?


Some of my Facebook friends actually went to Facebook to mention that Twitter was down. I wonder what would happen if both Twitter and Facebook were down simultaneously...


That sounds like a plot for an attack! =P Probably mass SMS.. iMessage/BBM, something like that?


Everyone reverts back to using email...


I highly doubt that a site that operates at the scale of Twitter would be susceptible to a DDoS; or wouldn't at least of provisions in place to lessen the effect of such an attack.


I agree with you, I think the headline in this case is ill-advised, especially since the body of the report quotes a security professional who casts doubt on a DDoS as the culprit behind today's downtime. I fear it might have been chosen because it's a more provocative headline...


Twitter is pretty quick to block access by IP. I occasionally run into it even during normal usage, when I open a bunch of profile pages.


No - Twitter outage blamed on 'cascading bug'.




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