Multiple social networking sites get shut down due to DOS

Today, the popular social networking site Twitter, has been offline for several hours. Many people have tried to access the site from the internet and other apps such as Twitterific and TweetDeck, but no one seems to be able to get on. The company posted around 8:15 a.m PDT that the site was back up, but I was still unable to access it. The main reason for the temporary shut down was a denial-of-service attack that they had to defend against. A denial-of-service attack occurs when hackers overload a Web Service's infrastructure with data, causing the servers to slow down to a crawl or crash.

Facebook has also noticed some slow downs with loading times and problems with some of their third party applications, but no one is sure if these two are interconnected. This raises the issue if a hosting service is to blame. Live Journal is also experiencing issues with their connection. Many people say that they get an error message saying that "Live Journal may be slow or unresponsive due to database issues."

Some people think that this is no big deal, seeing that the annual Defcon hacker convention was just a few days ago. Seeing how these attacks coincide with the convention, it will be an interesting next couple of days to see if these popular websites make it back online.

Update on Aug 6, 2009 at 9:35 PM by Jake Rauscher

Twitter is now back up and running smoothly, along with other sites such as Facebook. Nobody was particularly worried about these DOS attacks but could this be showing us the true vulnerability of some of these sites?

Comments

[Chris]

Score one for the good guys.