Twitter silenced in attack; other social networking sites hit

twitter_logo.jpg

Thursday morning saw a shockingly successful denial-of-service attack on social networking sites Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal.

Twitter was down for several hours, while Facebook and LiveJournal users encountered errors, slow service and other problems. 

In a denial-of-service attack, an attacker tries to prevent an internet site or service from functioning efficiently, thus denying access of information or services to legitimate users. In the most common kind of denial-of-service attack, the attacker or attackers flood a website or a network system repeatedly with information. The attacked site’s server can only process a certain number of requests at once, so if an attacker overloads the server with requests, it cannot process them. 

The attack on Twitter lasted about three hours and rendered 44 million worldwide tweeters silent.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone commented on the attack via the offcial Twitter blog:

On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.

Facebook also confirmed that it "encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial-of-service attack,” said Facebook spokeswoman Kathleen Loughlin in an e-mail.

Loughlin told the 250 million active users “no user data was at risk" and that Facebook has "restored full access to the site for most users."

Although Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal appear to be back in working order, investigations are underway to determine the source of the attacks.

Don't miss out on our newest articles, episodes and events!
Sign up for our newsletter