Twitter Panic !

August 6, 2009 · Filed Under Security, Tech

It seems that the great Twitter is down. I am not a Twitter user but found out about it earlier this morning on TechCrunch and now they announced that it is the cause of a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDOS). Of course most people would see this news and ask why are people panicking over this ? One main reason is that many websites use or depend on Twitter for certain functionality, thus, if Twitter doesn’t work then neither does there website. Another reason for the panic is that Twitter has become a news source where people around the world report incidents and news before any big news broadcaster could do it. So without no Twitter we are back to “slow” news around the world.

This brings up different topics too. Where is Twitters’ security team? If they are such a huge website then they should have better security and should had prevented this better. It also brings up the topic of Clouds computing, where people put all their eggs in one basket, and one thing breaks everything else does. This is another classic example of that. At this moment it seems that Twitter is stabilizing. Now the game should start of who is to blame? Was it a government attack?

Other websites affected some what: Facebook, LiveJournal and other smaller names.

Yasser

Tags: Security, Twitter