Update to the big ongoing Twitter outage that has brought the service down since at least 6:00 am California time today: It’s a DDOS attack. That’s way more exciting than run of the mill outages that have plagued the site since forever. Stay tuned.
Update: As of 8:16 Twitter is partially live again.
Update 2: Twitter has updated it’s status page saying the site is back up, yet they are still defending against the attack.
Update 3: Outage moves into day 2.
Sounds like something you say when you have a real serious problem.
Is your electricity back?
no. jerks.
With the rate of these updates on the Twitter outage, looks like you’re turning TC into a microblogging service.
What does all of this mean exactly?
it means PG&E is an evil company.
It means new content for bloggers, it means GaryVee won’t be able to vanity search for a while, it means the debate on security in the cloud will rear its head for again, it means we won’t find out what Steven Fry’s having for dinner tonight, it means that speculation will increase as to who’s next in the DDOS firing line, it means the world’s news agencies are back in the driving seat – a bit like Michael Schumacher – it won’t last, it means a lot to many people and nothing to far more people….
**Apologies to Stephen Fry for the misspelling.
It means it’s a slow news day.
It means time to sleep!
“It means it’s a slow news day.”
Hahaha.
I wonder if my twitter account is back from being banned. Good for them, how does it feel now?
Hail the Russians
we already know that. do you know who’s the murderer? (4chan kids said they’d attack 9/2)
no idea if it’s 4chan. someone needs to scroll thru http://img.4cha...b/imgboard.html and figure out what all those preteens are up to.
It’s definitely the 4Chan crew and their associated botnet connections. Given that Twitter in the past has had a total FAIL in terms of security I assume they are exploiting something that should-be-patched-or-protected-but-isn’t-or-is-done-so-with-the-word-password.
Thx.
It’s a DDoS – the attack vector has nothing to do with compromising local security – it’s an attack that throws traffic at the site until it stops.
isn’t 4chan suppost to attack on september?
Michael, 4chan aren’t “pre-teens” — those are just the frontline suicide bombers. They are very much adults with very definitive Leninist anarcho-terrorist ideologies.
BTW, 4chan never forgives, never forgets, and never makes a coherent demand, unlike real terrorists.
So many someone should offer them a lifetime supply of Jolt and jerky (or maybe Red Bull and Ringdings), charter ban-free membership to Second Life Copybot and Builderbot plus a promise never to use Twitter for srs bizness. Oh, and cocks.
When I say not all of us are pre-teens, what I mean is, one dude is 20!
“Leninist anarcho-terrorist ideologies”
This line makes no sense.
New just in: Facebook are DDOSing Twitter, in an effort to drive traffic back to their site.
In all seriousness though, it’s like the Internet is momentarily down. This is worse than when Google went down. No news, no conversations, just blank Tweetdeck columns. It’s not nice.
lol
I know I may get a lot of heat for this but I do feel it definitely feels like I’m not connected with everything going on since Twitter is down. Almost like leaving your cell phone at home. Just goes to show the how quickly the service has grown on people. While I don’t tweet about my personal life, I do use their search quite often. I used it when I first heard that Clinton freed the Journalist at a time when I couldn’t find the story on Google.
>>I do feel it definitely feels like I’m not connected with everything going on since Twitter is down.
Ever watch Star Trek: The Next Generation? Remember the episodes with The Borg talking about being connected to each other (i.e., “the Collective”)? Remember how they, too, were feeling kinda down when “unplugged” from it?
I think Twitter is on its way to becoming Borg-like where we’ll all be interconnected. It’ll probably be tied into the RFID mico-chip technology somehow. “Resistance is futile.”
)
The Borg,
I have no problem with that at all, but I think that if it’s going to turn us into the Borg, it will need to find someone to be its voice–its leader. It needs its Locutus. Hmm…and this Locutus can’t be someone who already works there….
So, who’s the best candidate? (looks around) Michael Arrington. Yes, it would seem that Michael Arringotn is the leading candidate to be the Locutus of Twitter. I’ve already arranged to have the laser light coming out of his eye installed.
will,
lol just because you want to insert lasers into his eyes doesn’t mean he’ll be the voice leader. didn’t the name some celebs in the twitterdocs. it should be aplusk or pdiddy and his whole “LOCKED IN!!!!!!” bull.
Yea, those docs basically said that Pdiddy was too dumb to help them, and they should try to ignore him w/out being rude.
So, it can’t be pdiddy.
I’m thinking Arrington is still the most qualified. And he would do it if presented with the opportunity.
one lady said she felt lost in the news article i read. so you’re not alone. it’s understandable.
I felt an empty void, and it filled me with the misery of thousand missing ships at sea.
well i just found out thag google has been bending to apple’s whims, so i am now joining that ship’s graveyard feeling of loneliness.
so if the planet has no pulse, is the planet dead?
No its going to be dead!
CPR?
1…2…3…beeeepppp
social media will never die.
Facebook is being kind goofy too. I can’t connect to the facebook chat on digsby and it was being buggy this morning when I logged in to the actual page.
Hard to fault Twitter for this, since it is tough for any large scale media company to safe guard themselves against such an (obviously) coordinated attack.
CitySpeek.com is a great alternative when twitter is down
Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend and recover from this attack.
The twitter status blog says they’re back up. I see differently.
Anyone else?
They can claim it’s back up all they want, I’m not seeing it. Imagine if PG&E kept telling Mike his electricity is back but he still can’t use his electric razor …
TweetDeck kicked back on then Twitter itself started working for me about 2m ago.
Still nothing here. You’ve retweeted the most recent blog posts already, yes?
i can’t go to twitter.com, but http://twitter.com/TechCrunch works fine for me. weird.
I did.
http://twitter....atus/3166230975
TweetDeck works for me too, have you guys tried it?
Mike’s started shaving?
We’re still seeing user trouble reports at http://downrigh...now.com/twitter — so service may still be spotty. You can report your experiences on that page as well.
(downrightnow is a service that uses crowdsourcing and other sources to monitor service disruptions at popular web services.)
It was up……now Twitter is down again.
I refuse to believe this. To much action in a little period of time.
agree. i don’t expect it to be back up until next tuesday
I think the world really needed the break from eachother and twitter.
Maybe some crazy foreigners with poor English misread the leaked documents and actually thought twitter had billions to burn, so attacked them and are now trying to understand why they’re not getting paid.
who is a foreigner in your opinion?
lol
he did say “with poor English”, though, so it is not that bad.
Clinton didn’t pull through on his part of the bargain so NK is taking out social networking in return
It’s back people.
Not anymore….it just went down again.
I just did a technical write-up about their DDoS before it was really public.
Their hanging off a single network, which these days, seems insane.
Here’s the post:
http://www.blyo...wn-due-to-ddos/
Great writeup!
I feel sorry for them. We had this problem a while ago on gaming portal Igrajmo.se and we freakin went from hell and back due to it. Is hard, but if anyone can do it, they can.
Guys, just do it. And hopefully you are back as soon as possible.
wow seem like a lot of sites are getting royally owned
they really should be able to deal with a DDOS.
Maybe some sort of new modern form of terrorism… Ben laden might be behind it
Djihad 2.0
Yes. Bin Laden. Definitely. Or Al Qaeda’s cyberterrorism wing. Also, I have some hidden WMD to sell you.
As far as I know there is no proper way of defending yourself to a DDOS in advance. Correct me if I’m wrong.
You probably shouldn’t comment on technical topics.
It’s not… I still cant access.
Is Twitter Down for anyone else? IsTwitterDown.com says no but it seems down to me– I am able to hit the login and then everything else 404s
2 hours 6 minutes and still ticking… worst outage Twitter has ever experienced? Uptime Report for Twitter (August 2009) http://bit.ly/tdownaug
Twitter is pretty lame if they can’t defend a DOS attack. Maybe they should staff up on the security dept.
no one can defend themselves from a DDOS
It doesnt require any proper Hacking skills, really, Just the ability to aquire an IP address to target.
The website just gets flooded with pings which will eat up the allotted bandwidth of the system or server, eventually causing said system to crash.
Twitter is definitely not back up.
let’s all give crappy advice to twitter, as if they need it. I say reduce your ListenBacklog
Tell you guys, Hiroshima bombing is to blame – http://en.wikip...ma_and_Nagasaki
still waiting for the first hitler reference …
Sergey’s comment is relevant because today is the 54th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Your comment…. not so much.
my comment fits any comment thread http://en.wikip...org/wiki/Godwin’s_law
Twitter is still down as far as the UK is concerned…
Twitter still OOO in the UK!
Twitter still dead in Paris, France
I went for a walk and i felt better. So having Twitter down is a good thing
Still not up in the UK, and something seems to be playing havok with widgetbox blog feeds from wordpress too. Related?
I thought so… Maybe it is related to that worm that started yesterday affecting thousands of users?
Take a look:
http://blog.suc...vity-is-up.html
This is one of the dangers of relying more and more on very few, very large services. The internet was brilliantly designed to be decentralized, and now I think we’re seeing the undoing of that. If Google got DOSed planes would fall out of the sky.
What you said is mostly true. Except that for a company like Google, DOS and DDOS are not alien. Attempts should be happening on a daily basis. It’s just that they are well equipped (for the most part) to deal with this kind of situation. And Google at least is too good that as users we don’t even notice it.
Glad to hear it.
But I remember more than one gFail incident for whatever reason they occured
The fact remains that if you rely on one organization for your email, calendars, navigation, you effectively have all your eggs in one basket
I agree that the internet is brilliantly designed to be decentralized but it seems humans are brilliantly designed to be customers to userfriendly centralized services. The recent one-stop-shop behaviur of the masses on the internet is basically a good thing in my opinion because it creates large platforms were people can make connections and socialize. Vulnerability is of course the flipside to that coin. But I certainly hope that this attack doesnt´r result in a dozen Twitter, Blogger, or email services..that would feel like a going backwards.
I agree on the decentralized / centralized. It seems that the exposed vulnerability to DDoS isn’t going away anytime soon — might the hacker been trying to exploit a known error ? This feels similar to the 2000 Montreal hacks on eBay and Yahoo by 15 year old Mafiaboy / Michael Calce.
the reasoning behind this one is different though, although the tactic shares similarities.
Twitter should be up when Twitter is done, or else how’d people tweet that it isn’t up?
Update: As of 8:17 Twitter is DDOSed by all of it’s users attempting to update their statuses!
apparently there was something that might be a ddos attack against facebook. random facebook pages would not work for an hour, as reported in the facebook developers forum http://forum.de....php?pid=162403
still down in italy and even facebook gave some connection problem about half an hour ago.
Seriously they can’t even get their Pix Firewall to work right.
Just read last post
http://www.mwd.com
As far as I know there is no proper way of defending yourself to a well setup DDOS attack. All strategies mentioned in Cisco’s whitepaper (Since you mentioned Cisco) “Strategies to Protect Against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks” will not work to defend yourself from a DDOS originating from a big botnet; you will see real traffic, with real proper (http)requests originating from real hosts (which could be your customers). How would a Pix of ASA handle that?
Twitter is back!
Twitter Donwtime seams to be the revival of blog comments.
Twitter is still down for me…
maybe its getting too much traffic now with all this talk about ddos and whatnot.
I have a feeling the fembots will be here soon too, hahah I wonder if this has something to do with all the hacked then non-hacked accounts recently.
who cares! go out, take a walk and enjoy the sun!
can’t i’m at work and i use twitter as my breaks while files save and files transfer. It’s a decent time waster, i’d be outside if i could
its pouring down rain where i live… but good try tanadoo
TechCrunch should be experiencing some survival guilt. It’s like a remora hanging off the side of a dead whale.
What’s with the apostrophe in “Get’s?”
Hey Mike, just throwing this out there, but maybe the Arrington ranch should get equipped with a solar energy solution. Instead of paying PG&E, they would actually pay you (if you could generate more than you use) -and best of all you’d inspire others to do the same.
the BBC are reporting it. It must be VERY VERY serious then. http://news.bbc...ogy/default.stm
Still anything that shuts up @wossy the tossy and @stephenfry can’t be knocked too much.
If BBC’s reporting it, CNN must be having an aneurysm without their precious viewer tweets.
saw it on cnn too. lots of people reporting this.
Well, twitter’s status page never reported a DDOS. They report a DOS (which may be a distributed one, but nothing says so yet).
Looks like DDOS is a famous acronym, though: all the sites talking about twitter’s downtime made the same mistake.
There’s panic in the streets and some lady next to me just went into labour WTF!!!!!
You should Tweetâ„¢ that
And you’re trapped in an elevator.
It seems to be back online, still a bit slow and flaky though but at least they’re making progress.
There’s panic in the streets and some lady next to me just went into labour WTF!!!!!
Russian submarines spotted off the east coast *cough*.
Its back up!