We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

Will Someone Claim Responsibility For This Attack Like with 9/11?

I just mentioned that 9/11 occurred on a morning that started with the letter “T” Thursday morning as well. These sort of attacks usually occur to websites because someone disagrees with the website, wants to make a statement or wants to be recognized as a haxor. Part of fending off the attacks is identifying the source of the attack, notifying ISP’s and if warranted, getting the police involved. I would suspect that bringing down twitter took thousands of computers. People who blow things up, take hostages and attack websites are not filled with courage. They often suffer from feelings of inadequacy and hold long term resentments against the people they perceive as “the enemy”. Virus writers are similar. Somehow the power hunger is satisfied when they see their plan full executed so in this case they received joy from seeing people complain about Twitter not working the same way people were emotionally devastated after 9/11.

What is a Denial of Service or DDOS Attack?

Basically, it means that a site is overloaded with requests so it appears down. A popular method to attack websites involves gaining control of computers infected with spyware and much like zombies, asking them to constantly make requests to the selected site. This can be done in a variety of ways as well.

From the Wikipedia article on Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers.

One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

What Can You Do In The Meantime?

Just hang tight and keep checking the Twitter status page for updates.

If you can, please don’t try to keep Tweeting or connecting to the Twitter page since you are just contributing to the number of requests.

Maybe you want to spend some time blogging about how Twitter has changed:

• Your life
• How you work
• How you do business with customers
• How you interact with other people vs before Twitter

It could be very much like the NYC power outage of 1977 where lots of babies were born 9 months later, maybe there will be a flurry of blog posts today!

What Can Other Web 2.0 Companies Learn From This?

I think Twitter did an excellent job at notifying people of what was going on. They have maintained their status page and I have it bookmarked.

They also made sure the status page is hosted on a different ip address than their main service site. A very smart move.

Update 8/7/2009 12:59am I see the Twitter Denial of Service Attack was covered a few hours later at Mashable