back to article 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 …

COMMENTS

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  1. Gordon Paterson
    Pint

    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.

  2. AC 4
    Megaphone

    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

  3. 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!

  4. richard 80
    Flame

    J'accuse

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

  5. Adam Salisbury
    Pint

    Go Clueley :D

    Couldn't have said it better myself!

  6. 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.

  7. CanaDanimal
    Happy

    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!!

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    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

  9. 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.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    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.

  11. northern monkey
    Alert

    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!?

  12. Absent
    Grenade

    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.

  13. /dev/me
    Happy

    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.

  14. Shane 8
    Thumb Up

    /CHEER

    *crosses fingers* lets hope facebook is next!

  15. TheTick
    Happy

    Too many twits make a tw...

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

  16. Anonymous Coward
    IT Angle

    Tw@tter outage

    So what's the downside of this??

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    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.

  18. AB
    FAIL

    Oh noes!

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

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

  19. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    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.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Headmaster

    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.

  21. Dillon Pyron
    Grenade

    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.

  22. magnetik
    Joke

    Shouldn't that be ..

    "Twitter goes twitsup" ?

  23. ThinkingOutLoud
    Paris Hilton

    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.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    @amanfromMars 1

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

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    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!

  26. Chris King
    FAIL

    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" ?

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    amanfromMars is losing it...

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

  28. Anonymous Coward
    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.

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    facebook hacking going on

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

  30. 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?

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Boo Hoo

    Maybe the twits will finally get a real life?

  32. 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...

  33. Ian Bradshaw
    Paris Hilton

    Facebook

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

    Paris ... just for the tits.

  34. Anonymous Coward
    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?

  35. Adam Williamson 1
    Thumb Up

    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'. :)

  36. James O'Brien
    Paris Hilton

    @Lis 0r

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

  37. 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.

  38. sun_god
    Thumb Down

    #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.

  39. 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...

  40. Ian McNee
    FAIL

    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).

  41. Dunhill
    Pint

    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

  42. Owen Sweeney
    Pint

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

    Chicken Little - the sky is falling!!!

  43. Gerry Doyle 1
    FAIL

    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...'

  44. 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?

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