Twitter being victimized by a denial of service attack this morning made me realize that I've gotten so used to using Twitter to find out real-time info about odd happenings such as when a major credit card processor went down for almost a day at the beginning of July, that I almost forgot how to find current news of this sort from other sources.
Breaking news that isn't quite CNN worthy, such as a site being down, can be challenging to find on the web. For the first time in months, I used Google to try to find info on a breaking web event and typed "Twitter down" to find out what was happening with Twitter when I couldn't connect for a couple hours this morning. I was trying to answer the questions is it me (or some network pipeline problem somewhere) , or is it Twitter? Had some other site been down, I would have checked Twitter to see what was being said.
Unfortunately it IS Twitter, being victimized by a denial of service attack, which takes place when a mailicious party or parties attempt to overwhelm a web server(s) with so much traffic, it essentially crashes or slows to a crawl. People attempting to reach Twitter, right now don't even see the famous "fail whale" graphic which Twitter displays when they have internal problems and overloads.
Fortunately, Twitter, like other big sites has a status page that is hosted at a totally different location or server, that at least allows them to update those who know about the existence of the status page. Their blog has also been up intermittently, and they've confirmed the denial of service attack on both pages.
I hope that this attack is just some pranksters, or college kids with time on their hands until they get back to school. Considering the amount of political and sensitive commentary published on Twitter, both terrorists and totalitarian governments could consider Twitter a worthy target for this sort of attack. A recent example of this type of Twittering is the hundreds and sometimes thousands of tweets per minute generated during the Iran election controversy, which were labeled #iranelection, and still continue today, although at a slower pace. In some cases these Tweets came from within Iran and provided a source of information directly on the scene when mainstream journalists were forbidden to report from within Iran.
Update - just as I am publishing this post at 11:44am Eastern time, I was able to load the Twitter front page and DoS and DDoS for "Denial of service" and "Distributed Denial of Service" were the top topics listed, so some people were getting through, and, possibly, contributing the the problem as when a server is overwhelmed, all the extra traffic generated by people frantically trying to reach it and Tweeting when they do get through may add to the problem.