Twitter Hit with DDoS Attack

On Thursday morning, I decided to check my Twitter account and was greeted by a “Network Timeout” error. I tried several more times and finally gave up, thinking I’d just try later. I thought nothing more about it until I heard the news item on a local radio station that Twitter had been DDoS’d. This was confirmed at http://status.twitter.com:

Ongoing denial-of-service attack

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

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.

Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.

Update (4:14p): Site latency has continued to improve, however some web requests continue to fail. This means that some people may be unable to post or follow from the website.

As of late yesterday morning communication with the API and SMS was still down.

As usual, there always seems to be some humor in these situations. Here’s a comment by John Pescatore of SANS Institute from the SANS News Bites:

[Editor's Note (Pescatore): Wow, 2 hours without tweets! That's like a
car drive to the shore without anyone in the back seat saying "Are we
there yet? I see a rock. Is that a seagull? I like saltwater taffy.
Shaquille Oneal is really tall. Are we there yet?" the entire trip.]