Twitter went down last week. So did Facebook, LiveJournal, and Blogger.
They were all victims of a denial of service attack that was, depending on who you believe, either the work of Russian nationalist hackers targeting a Georgian economist, a clever ploy by the United Economists of Georgia to garner sympathy by feigning an attack by Russian nationalist hackers, or an attempt by Paramount Pictures to divert attention from reviews of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
But Twitter was what struggled most in the face of the attack. The result was hundreds of thousands of frustrated users, plaintive API calls gone unheeded, and pods full of exhausted fail whales working double, even triple, shifts.
Yet we all made it (including countless girl’s-name-plus-random-four-digits Twitter spam accounts… oh, how I missed you lot these past few days). I’ll let you know where to get your “I Survived the Twitter DoS Attack of 2009” t-shirts shortly.
