Twitter and Livejournal completely fell over around an hour ago, and Facebook has been bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. News sites and blogs are strangely silent about it all. TechCrunchers are speculating a little.
DDoS, domino effect, outlandish coincidence, or something else? Who knows? All I know is that good old IRC and Dreamwidth are keeping my chatter needs satisfied for now.
Update: These graphs from DownRightNow (for livejournal and twitter ) are kinda neat, though I can’t vouch for their accuracy. Certainly Twitter seems to have been dead as a doornail, not just a little bit glitchy.
Categories: technology
ATO scammer time of the year again for Aussies 
Link OTD: DIY Feminist Cybersecurity 
For those times when actually blocking someone on FB is socially awkward 
Unhappy data retention day 
Hoyden About Town 
Twitter now says it’s a DOS attack.
I was just about to write something highly insightful about how this had affected me as I came home after Rock Eisteddfod to a blank Tweetdeck OOS message, but I just looked at Tweetdeck again and Twitter’s back up! (and the sooner people realise it, the sooner Facebook will be usable again)
*off to social networks*
Oh, comments crossed.
So, are the same DOSsers hitting LJ? Big attack if so.
We have no idea at the moment, as far as I can tell. People have speculated that Facebook only fell over because people were going there instead of to Twitter, but do you find that really convincing? A handful others (TechCrunch commenters) are all “OMG foreign terrorists!” which I don’t find terribly convincing either. Though I suppose you never know.
I guess maybe we’ll find out tomorrow.
The idea that Twitter falling over means an overflow that throttles Facebook would be an interesting illustration of how much ground Twitter’s cut out from FB’s expansion plans, if true.
I’ve certainly noticed since following folks on Twitter that there’s a lot of lowkey social chat there that IMO used to happen on blogs, LJs and FB. People find the various Twitter clients beeping at them more immediately satisfying, or whatever. I guess most of those people are also on FB, so it would be a natural fallback. As you say, we’ll see.
I doubt the terrorists will come for Twitter/LJ first, either. Not terribly convincing at all.
LJ has been having server problems for a while, so it goes up and down on a regular basis.
Yesterday JF was down and it was awful. WOE.
The Register has an update with one theory:
I haven’t read much on the tech blogs about it, but quite a few folks were saying that Twitter needed to have more servers and mirrors to distribute the load. Interesting that they were essentially a collateral casualty though. Apparently Friendfeed was down as well as Twitter and LJ – I wonder what specificially they had in common that this attack was able to exploit?
Where do you hang out on IRC? I can never find anywhere good to hang out these days, but I’m a social animal and I have chatting needs, man!
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