Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal spent yesterday battling a DDOS attack that started around 6 am California time. Twitter and LiveJournal went down hard, Facebook stayed mostly online but was clearly under strain. CNET reports that a single individual’s accounts on the services may have been the primary target.
Now, nearly 24 hours later, Facebook and LiveJournal appear to be performing normally. But Twitter is down completely and has been for the last few hours.
As of 4 pm Twitter was saying things were looking better: “Site latency has continued to improve.” But for most users, all third party services have been completely unusable for the last 20 hours or so (Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Power Twitter, etc..), bringing down the entire Twitter ecosystem. The Twitter.com site itself hasn’t been reliable either.
The Twitter status blog has been silent since that 4:14 update.
I’ve been noticing that I haven’t been able to get onto Twitter at different times of the day, though right now I am able to access my account despite the relatively slow load times.
as of now, 1:25 am CA time, it’s down for me and it’s officially down: http://downfore...com/twitter.com
Twitter is working here (Mauritius) even though when I check with http://downfore...com/twitter.com it says it is down
Looks like the Soviet Union is back, baby!
Its working for me, but its quite an on and off situation…I am using twittergadget on igoogle, and it can only access the first page of tweets, i try to hit the older link, and it shows twitter is down. Darn, this seems serious. So, are we noticing the REAL Twitpocalypse ??
amateur hour?
Attack on this user http://twitter.com/cyxymu These Russians and Chinese will remain uncivilized..
If twitter users follow @cyxymu then that will defeat the point of the attack, and make it clear actions of this type are not to be tollarated.
To be fair to Twitter their website for Cyxymu is still up where LiveJournal isn’t (not sure which one is Facebooks page for Cyxymu).
http://twitter.com/Cyxymu (up)
http://cyxymu1....ivejournal.com/ (down)
http://facebook.com/cyxymu
Blody Russians….! Oof will they nuke me now?!
I haven’t been able to upload my twitter background for the last 24 hrs. In fact you can’t make any adjustments at all if you want to save them. Anyone know when this will be fixed?
Oh noes! Whatever will you do? Life is so meaningless without being able to change your twitter background!
Uploading a new background was number 33 on my to do list today. So Twitter is down, no big deal. Doesn’t really mean that much to me. My business will go on. I would just like to know when this functionality is working again so I can mark this task off of my list.
Hope I didn’t interrupt you from the most important thing in your life which is jerking off in front of your computer.
I suggest you do something productive today like clean up your mess down in your parents basement. It will help you feel better about yourself.
So, while your probably jerking off down in your parents basement, just ask yourself a question.
What am I doing with my life?
“So, while your probably…”
Why don’t you do something productive like learning how to spell?
So much for trying to post a comment on my iphone. It’s hard to do careful proofs.
Seems a lot better now – the Twitter auth is working on our site again.
What am I supposed to do with my time now? If I don’t know every mundane detail of my friends I may as well bury my head in sand.
i feel so sorry for you that your life is so boring that you can not find something better to do with the lost time. there are a million things you can do until it is back. there are so many programs out here to choose from. facebook, myspace, messenger.. t.v, radio, books, etc. have fun!
*sits back with great view as sarcasm flies clear over greg’s head*
Never comment again.
Not for us in the UK – it’s fine.
I should like to point out I have been testing the site regurlarly using simple API calls like “Return my Michael Arrington’s Follower List” and most of the time I get no response at all.
I promise you, Twitter is up and down like a yo-yo all over the world.
You have a Michael Arrington? How much did he cost? I heard he’s pretty cheap these days #hookerfail
Facebook is down for me – altough that might be a different problem
It says, when trying to log-in: ‘Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.’
That happens all the time
that’s just everyday stuff for facebook.
Must be hard to run a website with hundreds of millions of people wanting to get on. Especially when you are not a filthy rich company.
Zuckerberg?
Twitter is up for me…
Yep, it’s fine here in England. A little slow to refresh etc, but working.
im in nz..ive been seein the m.twitter.com site ok on and off all day but been unable to post wat so ever. thats cleared up slightly in the past couple hrs..however stil very patchy. some 3rd party widgets etc are ok some not.. and even the web site istself sometimes ok sometimes not.
Wow, I thought they spoke English in New Zealand…
Here in India.. twitter is down!
http://downfore...com/twitter.com
So far so good, I have just used Twitter now and didnt have any problems.
Yeah, Twitter.com works fine for me too (in the UK). External apps like CoTweet, however, are really feeling the pinch.
It’s the ramifications of how popular and significant Twitter has become and how its issues affect the businesses that have come to rely upon it that is increasingly going to be the real story here.
Not much that can be done if you’re being attacked, and it’s all part of the learning curve, but for CoTweet et al it must be an absolute nightmare. Especially as Twitter’s status is so slow to update, and vague when it does, to be essentially useless.
Also, Dabr, my mobile Twitter client of choice, hasn’t come back online at all.
is it because that it is the weehours now in USA? so they take this timegap for Server Maintaining to resist more fierce attack?? ……ingoring other users in the world..
In Israel – Twitter is completely down for a day now.
Twitter is working fine here in the Netherlands…
I would imagine that google and facebook have been able to invest in extra capacity that allows them to withstand this kind of attack. Twitter on the other hand has had enough trouble keeping up with its growth.
Would someone who is more tech savvy let me know if these thoughts are correct? Or are there other reasons that Twitter is in the worst position?
My day in the office has been even more dull than usual because of this. I’ve actually had to do some work. Outrageous.
(Right after I stop writing comments on techcrunch posts)
Here is in Korea, Seoul.. it’s working right..
I did an update to the blog I did yesterday:
http://www.blyo...eahboobies-com/
Thanks. Interesting.
But i thought the status page was powered by tumblr.com so does that mean that tumbrl.com is hosted by the same people?
I had a number of people say they were able to post through twitlonger but not the twitter site and there has been a steady stream of posts being made through the night. Haven’t had any issues this morning on my personal account (again in the the UK) so it does look as if it’s consistently patchy as opposed to bouts of downtime.
Sometimes i am able to open it.. while most of the times its down.. None of my friends in India have been able to open twitter since yesterday!
How come people are retweeting this article? it is working in some geographies?
odd enough, Plurk also went down for a little while but recovered quickly compared to Twitter.
Nobody cares about Plurk.
Is there any way to defend against DDOS attacks from a large number of different IP addresses?
way
1) block them all
2) have more bandwidth then them (unlikely)
3) as the ISP to throttle their traffic (unlikely)
4) physicaly remove the threat (even twitter doesn’t have that much influrance)
Ahh, so is it possible to identify them and automatically block them before they can do too much damage without blocking non-abusive IPs?
I always thought that the above method was a sure way to stop them, but someone told me that there is no way to actually defend against it and that many companies end up paying them off.
No.
It is extremely extremely difficult to correct for a ddos if you are not prepared and very difficult and expensive to “prepare”.
wow, scary stuff!
Thanks for the replies guys.
yeah. me too. i didn’t know exactly what goes into preventing something like this from happening and succeeding in crippling your site when it does. commen sense told me that people deal with the attack as it happens, but i don’t know that to be true because lol i am not a tech person (yeah it’s my excuse. kinda like megan mccain saying i wasn’t born then so i don’t know, and paul begala saying i wasn’t born during the french revolution but doesn’t mean i can’t read about it). i just found out from reading the comments of all these postings that there’s no surefire way to defend yourself from a dos attack, and that the process used isn’t always successful.
why don’t people use this site instead to check whether a particular site is down?
http://internet...www.twitter.com
that downforeveryoneorjustme.com site probably just uses one random place to check from vs locations all over the world, plus you can see loading times, etc.
thanks
; yeah way better than downforme,…
How do you defend against an attack on mulitple IP addresses?
We’ve been attacked a few times and our ISP tells us there is nothing you can really do except wait it out – This can’t be the case since the big boys deal with it all the time. Are you just supposed to absorb it with multiple servers?
It’s hard for an ISP-hosted site to guard against it due to the typically limited bandwidth to the site. You’d setup an IP filter for your site, but most likely the pipe to your filter is already flooded with packets. If you were a big boy, you’d be closer to the backbone, thus having more bandwidth to absorb the attack. It would be interesting to see the Twitter network architecture – they should qualify as “big boy.”
We have been hosting web sites since 1996. No, you DO NOT “wait it out” when your site is under attack. Your site may go down for a few days if you just wait it out.
This is what I do,
1. identify the port that is under attack,
2. throttle – limit the number of connections,
3. identify the IPs from which the attacks come from. There are some tools for identifying those IPs with unusual amount of packets.
Tons of backbone or bandwidth alone will not help because the router and the web server that are receiving the attack packets will all be choked.
running a lousy boutique ISP eh?
that crappy tactic only stop the lamest source attacks.
I’m not a hard core tweeter but I haven’t noticed a problem at all the last two days.
That’s very strange. How often do you check Twitter?
I bet its from Iran!!
Here on the eastern shore, I have encountered no interruptions whatsoever with Twitter or Facebook.
Its said that Google sites too, particularly youtube and gmail had the problems..
i’ve been online (while working as well as reading) for about 3 or 4 days straight using my gmail all hours of the day and haven’t had a problem at all…and i’ve accessed more than 1000 websites from google in that same span and not had a problem. some were google sites.
oh and blogger is fine for me.
I read “Twitter Outrage move Into Day 2″.
I”ve been trying to post these to Twitter but….you know, it down. So I will post them here!
#1 Denial-of-Service Attack? What does AT&T have to do with Twitter being down? OH!
#2 What do Twitter and an iPhone user have in common? They both suffer from Denial of Service!
#3 Slow, unresponsive and frequently not working…When did AT&T buy Twitter? OH! The new company name will be AT&Twitter, We #fail in more places!
9:50 AM EST Twitter seems to be working for me. Even Twitterrific.
Clearly it’s because “rails can’t scale”.
http://canrailsscale.com/
Twitter has been working for me without any problems.
With all due respect I think these “site is down” posts are getting old and boring and what’s worse it’s that they are in almost EVERY site I visit, buy hey, they seem to “work”! so maybe I should start a blog full of these.
Twitter and the 3rd party seem to be working just fine. I’ve heard this twitter story on every news outlet. Can we just drop the topic unless twitter shuts down for good? Most Twitter users already know what the problem is, I;m pretty sure, they don’t need to be updated about it every few hours. http://ziggytek.com/
Haven’t been able to post for about 16 hours, just tried again and still not posting. I’m in the UK
I can read. I cannot post, not yet anyway.
I can’t update my status as of yet though i can see other people updates in my timeline
Twitter was a bit erratic yesterday afternoon but worked fine last night and TweetDeck has been working just fine for me since early yesterday afternoon and both are working just fine this morning.
MySpace was well up when all this is happening. Looks like they have a very good network security measures in place.
* typo
MySpace was well up when all this is happening. Looks like they have very good network security measures in place.
so how come myspace wasn’t affected by this, is it because it’s not popular enough. it seemed like this attack is not just for fb, twitter, lj. like there’s some social media (because of large user base) that gets attacked but some don’t. if you’re trying to cover yourself why wouldn’t you attack as many social media sites as you can.
i read somewhere that gawker got hacked earlier this week. seems like a good week for people who like to have fun by inconveniencing others.
This was the first time that I encountered this kind of situation for Twitter. It’s been a hard day with tweeting.
As much respect as I have for Biz, Evan, and company – which I do have immense amounts of – I still wish they’d sell themselves to Google. It seems laughable to say but Twitter has pretty much become necessity to modern life for the masses and GOOG is the only real powerhouse I trust to make it (nearly) unbreakable. And not evil.
Mike – I assume your power is back on.
I know this definitely slowed down an internal project we had here at Bloom Apps, since we were relying on the API. But it only lasted (by the time we had started) an hour or so. Then today (this morning) we again fell into some API connection issues. Hope it’s back up soon!
Twitter posted another status update this morning confirming ongoing issues with the API and SMS connectivity. We’re continuing to track user reports and official announcements over at http://downrigh...now.com/twitter
Yeah its been a while now !! And its getting on nerves ..
This is precisely why I’m a little bit sceptical about Twitter’s future as a “revolution” in social networking, or that it’s as wonderful as everyone has been saying.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s an absolutely brilliant idea. The trouble is that everyone is tying themselves to one closed interface that might disappear or change at any moment.
To use an analogy here, I absolutely love GMail; I think it’s the most brilliant Email service on the planet. But imagine if, rather than communicating using open Email standards, Gmail could only communicate with other Gmail users. On the surface, this might be all right, because everyone could just switch to Gmail. But what if Gmail were to go down, start charging a mandatory service fee, or alter so much that it was no longer the same terrific service that it once was? Just like that, Email as we know it would disintegrate.
Likewise with Twitter. They could start charging anytime. They could shut down the service (or it could go down for a lengthy period of time). They could flood it with ads. And everyone who depends on it for business or pleasure would be locked out, just like that.
Think about the level of control Twitter has over everyone who loves it, before you start posting 160-character updates again.
If somebody at TC wants to go “above and beyond” with some investigative journalism, take a look at the details of the targeted blogger and why the Russians so badly want to silence him. All too many Americans seem to be unaware of the brutal and unprovoked military attack that Russia made on pro-Western Georgia not all that long ago, and this is likely a cyberwarfare extension of that, encroaching onto American electronic ground.
In Brazil: I can sign in but I can not post; latency is very high.
8-7-09 9pm on the U.S. east coast and still locked out. I know that I was having some problems with connecting and changing pages a couple of days before this was made public. I thought maybe to much traffic.
twitter is just so horrible
Twitter and Facebook are working fine for me. Livejournal, though, has been down consistently since about midday yesterday. How come it’s like that, with some sites working for some people in certain places and not others?