Say it isn’t so! The Twitter bird’s beak was closed Thursday as Twitter fought a distributed denial-of-service attack that shut it down for several hours.
With the mini-blogging site down from 9 a.m. Eastern time until noon, its millions of members were unable to tweet by Web and by mobile phone. A tweet test brought an error message that the “network request failed.”
Twitter engineers weren’t saying much, but offered this explanation on the company’s official blog: “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.” By noon Eastern time, another update said the site was back up but still fighting the attack.
A Botnet Attack
Denial-of-service attacks typically involve hundreds, if not thousands, of PCs pinging a target.
“Lots of PCs out there have already been compromised with bot clients because they have downloaded or clicked on something, and they have it on their PC and don’t even know it,” said John Pescatore, a vice president with Gartner’s Internet Security team.
Most experts are confirming the incident was a heavy DDoS attack. “From both ongoing and current observations, we have seen a lot of consistent traffic with added route withdrawals and re-announcements emanating from (Sweden and Europe),” said Jart Armin, a security expert with HostExploit. “This, in turn, is affecting Twitter’s server via Global Crossing.”
There were no reports of Twitter users being affected, other than not being able to access their accounts. “For a typical Twitter user today, it is not a big deal,” Pescatore said.
Businesses, however, felt a pinch because some use Twitter to promote their products. Computer maker Dell has made more than $3 million in sales from one of its Twitter accounts.
“Today’s Twitter downtime shows just how far Twitter has come in the last year,” said Michael Gartenberg, a vice president with Interpret….