Twitter goes titsup

Twitter was knocked offline on Thursday after the site became the victim of a distributed denial of service attack. Users of the micro-blogging service are used to seeing the fail whale, a graphic that appears when service is over capacity, but this time around the site was left completely unreachable from around 1500 on …

[Gordon Paterson]

Something Useful?

QUOTE "The outage has at least one positive effect. "All those Twitter addicts will be doing something more useful instead," Cluley quipped. ®"

Nah, we just spend all our time retrying to see if its back!!

Anyway Thursday is pub lunch day, work is a foreign concept on a thursday afternoon.

[AC 4]

Pah

"All those Twitter addicts will be doing something more useful instead"

like whinging about it on stalkerbook no doubt. If only this twat downtime was permanent

[Tom 15]

Let's hope...

Let's hope it's a DDoS attack not a DoS attack or there's something really wrong with their systems!

[richard 80]

J'accuse

Where was a Mr D. Cameron - sworn enemy of Twitter at 3pm???

[Adam Salisbury]

Go Clueley :D

Couldn't have said it better myself!

[EddieD]

First Gawk, now Twitter

Someone seems to have got it in for bloggers.

I wonder I could find them and buy them a drink.

[CanaDanimal]

Finally, a reason to cheer for hackers

In a related story - thousands of twidiots around the world are confused and confounded by the lack of useless stupidity they're used to being bombarded by!!

[Anonymous Coward]

How will I interact now???

I can't believe it. Not only is twitter down... but I can't tweet to tell my three followers how I feel about it! Gutted!

Ah well. I guess I'll have to settle for an El Reg comment instead.

Mine's the one with an iPhone in the pocket rammed to the gunnels with Twitter apps

[David Gosnell]

Not just Twitter

Facebook is also widely reported to be even more of a pile of poo than usual this afternoon, with all kinds of Ajax errors popping up if it does bugger all at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear...

Oh my I bet there's panic in the twitter world! How can they tell their followers that Twitter is down?! Probably why Facebook is being hammered at the mo... playing there rather than actually working.

[northern monkey]

Schrödinger's tweet

"All those Twitter addicts will be doing something more useful instead,"

But how will we ever now, if the twats don't tweet about it!?

[Absent]

Server strain

Even under normal circumstances Twitters growth seems to bring frequent whale screens so maybe they're running a fine line between server capacity/bandwidth expansion and user growth meaning it may not take that large an attack to bring down the entire system.

[/dev/me]

If someone asked me...

...why they couldn't reach twitter, I'd have told them to hit F5 repeatedly and rapidly until they'd be let in. Always eager to help out, I am.

But no one asked... :sad: a missed opportunity.

[Shane 8]

/CHEER

*crosses fingers* lets hope facebook is next!

[TheTick]

Too many twits make a tw...

My money's on Davey Boy over at Tory HQ being the evil mastermind of all these shenanigans.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tw@tter outage

So what's the downside of this??

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit

"The outage has at least one positive effect. "All those Twitter addicts will be doing something more useful instead," Cluley quipped"

What a load of bollocks - 'All those Twitter addicts' will just find another thing to waste their time doing, I very much doubt that any Twitter addicts will ever do anything useful.

[AB]

Oh noes!

All those business-critical, live-saving... err...

Face it: Twitter is useless. It's not even fun.

[amanfromMars 1]

Demand a Refund and Losses Payment for Executive Strain/IP Stress Testing.

That must be Poor Server Protection for the Twitterati. And TARP will supply Loss Funds to Re-Energise Intelligence in Social InterNetworking Sectors? One of those Spooky Rainbow Ops blasting Dark Matters with Blinding Colours in Future Brightness. NEUKlearer Turing Bombes XSSXXXXStreaming HyperRadioProActive IT Memes/ dDynamic Ethereal Waves.

[Anonymous Coward]

re: "More ominously"

"More ominously it was cited as a key element in recent anti-government unrest in Iran and in China."

Who it exactly was who was quoting it as a "key element"? The self-obsessed media. I don't remember any of the correspondents who were in Iran or China actually making reference to people using Twatter for anything. I do remember reference to nightime protests in Teheran of people climbing on the roofs to praise Allah in recalling the pre-revolutionary protests of 1979.

As for China I sadly remember the reporting of events and the idea somehow that if there is a camera present the authorities will sit up and listen. The hope being that in the West they might. As we all know that was not the case.

[Dillon Pyron]

Tweets about twitter

I can just imagine what will happen when the attack finally quits. All the twits will DDoS it on their own, sending billions of tweets along the lines of "twitter still down, oh well". Each one sent 30 or 31 times.

[magnetik]

Shouldn't that be ..

"Twitter goes twitsup" ?

[ThinkingOutLoud]

Tweeple are just IT savvy tramps.

The tramp in your local town square, shouting at the pigeons, has been doing for the last twenty years what we now do on our PCs.

Paris because she's a tramp, too. Just a better looking and hopefully better smelling one.

[Anonymous Coward]

@amanfromMars 1

I think your Martian universal translator must be malfunctioning. There's possibly a loose connection in the Initial Capital Suppression chip, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmmm

I just made a sandwich, it was full of cheese, salad and pickle. Now I feel quite stuffed.

Sorry, with twitter down, I didnt know who else to tell!

[Chris King]

Admiral, there be Fail Whales here !

@David Gosnell:

Facebook is definitely more shaky than usual - maybe all the Twitter users are posting "Oh noes Twitter is down and I'm having to learn how to write proper sentences again" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

amanfromMars is losing it...

That comment was infinitely more coherent and insightful than any tweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

@David Gosnell

So it wasn't just me then? I thought it was my ISP pissing me around again. Livejournal also vanished a few times.

[Anonymous Coward]

facebook hacking going on

hacked, can't reset password. Maybe some dns hijacking...

[Jon Thompson 2]

Er...

"All those Twitter addicts will be doing something more useful instead," Cluley quipped.

Do you have any idea just how much Cluely tweets news that is out of date, sometimes by days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Boo Hoo

Maybe the twits will finally get a real life?

[HafezMohsen]

Attack likely from Iran

It cannot be coincidence that right before all trouble begun, the facebook pages of the Iran opposition were suddenly not reacheable any more. The Facebook page of Mousavi is still out.

As the hashtag #iranelection has been in the trending topics for weeks now, it has to be clear Twitter is a major channel of communication for the opposition. LiveJournal contain many blogs of Irani opposition. And at the same time the other events happened, also http://iran.whyweprotest.net reported an outage.

That's all a bit too much to be just coincidence...

[Ian Bradshaw]

Facebook

been tits up as well this afternoon ... for a few hours by my reckoning.

Paris ... just for the tits.

[Anonymous Coward]

Life as per normal?

I'm a bit out of my technical depth here, but isn't a DDOS attack where someone gets a lot of other machines to each bombard one target with small packets of nonsense data?

Isn't that Business As Normal for Twitter?

[Adam Williamson 1]

correction

"The motives (much less the perpetrators) behind the assault remain unclear."

More terrible Reg journalism. This sentence makes no sense as written. The word 'perpetrators' should be replaced with 'bloody heroes'. :)

[James O'Brien]

@Lis 0r

My question is this, amanfromMars 1? There's more then one?

[disgruntled yank]

Bill Belichick

Is it a coincidence that the NFL training camps have just opened? Surely the New England Patriots are behind this, hoping to keep their players from tweeting about strategy, injuries, felonies, and so on.

[sun_god]

#iranelection is filled with mostly American bleeding hearts, not Iranian opposition

@ HafezMohsen said: "As the hashtag #iranelection has been in the trending topics for weeks now, it has to be clear Twitter is a major channel of communication for the opposition."

Sorry to say this HafezMohsen, that's bollocks. #iranelection long ago degraded into people retweeting the same garbage endlessly. I followed it for a day or two and it was just full of American bleeding hearts linking articles of Neda's murder and how to make home-made bombs.

Twitter is not the be-all end-all world changer that the Twitteratii and CNN like to pretend it is.

[Sean Nevin]

Icon

Who else here would love to have the story image (the dead bird) as an icon? Love it. Make it represent the general failure of all that Web2.0 nonsense...

[Ian McNee]

And in other news...

...the world did not implode as a result of the generalised outage of Web 2-pointless-oh sites. Human beings have been witnessed vectorising atomic vibrations at one another in co-incidental relativistic space-time (i.e. talking).

[Dunhill]

great, thank you all

And i got lately the feeling that i was the only one who does not use twitter/facebook/myspace etc

You all made me sane again today with the great comments

[Owen Sweeney]

It's the end of the world as we know it...

Chicken Little - the sky is falling!!!

[Gerry Doyle 1]

We'd have heard about it...

A friend of mine was having trouble and so phoned her IT people yesterday to ask if there was a problem with the net.

'Nah', they said. 'If there was we'd have heard about it on Twitter...'

[Venkat]

DDOS still possible with managed DNS?

Dynect lists Twitter as their client (http://dynect.com/_pdf/casestudy-twitter.pdf). Wouldn't an enterprise grade managed DNS service automatically take care of DDOS? Or, are there other factors to consider?