For those of you addicted to social networking, Thursday morning is starting out pretty rough. The two biggest sites for updating your status – Twitter and Facebook – are both experiencing issues this morning. Twitter’s outage started around 9 AM EST today, and while Facebook is up (somewhat), posting updates and wall comments is currently very flaky. And you can’t even go vent about how this makes you feel over on your LiveJournal blog because – guess what? – it’s down too.
Update: Twitter says they’re fighting off a DDOS attack right now but the site is back up. LJ also says they’re experiencing a DDOS attack.
According to the Twitter status blog, a posting around 10 AM EST simply reads: “Site is down. We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.” However, Twitter Search appears to be functional and is somehow pulling in recent tweets, so obviously Twitter has not completely “failwhaled” for everyone.
To make matters worse, Facebook is also experiencing issues this morning, as many rebuffed Twitter users are now finding out when they go to post their status on the social networking site instead. The Facebook outage appears to be intermittent, though, and isn’t affecting everyone. If you notice anything at all, it may be only that posting status updates and comments displays an error message. But simply clicking the post button again may force them through (at least that was my experience). The site also loads slowly at times and displays occasional “transport” errors.
Ironically, you can see several complaints on Twitter about this issue right now when doing a Twitter search with the keyword Facebook.
As a last resort, some users may turn to their LiveJournal blogs and attempt to update their mood to “sad” to reflect their feelings about this odd cyber-outage. Unfortunately, they’ll be foiled there as well since LJ is down, too.
Some users are already spreading a rumor that this is some sort of social media attack by hackers, but it’s more likely just a bizarre coincidence. Maybe the universe just wants us to actually get some work done today.
Update: The Facebook issues may be affecting comments which are integrated with the Facebook Connect system. I just attempted to post a comment here on RWW and it seemed to get stuck when the Facebook Connect window appeared. However, clicking the “X” to close the window allowed the comment go through.
Update 2: LJ came back up around 10:45 EST. Facebook is still flaky and Twitter is still down.
Update 3: Twitter just updated that they’re defending themselves against a denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. Could this be the issue for the other sites, too? (10 AM EST)
Update 4: Twitter reports the site is back up, but they are still fighting off the DDOS attack. (approx. 10:55 AM EST). However, despite what the post says, the site is not back up for some people. You can keep tabs on the extent of Twitter’s downtime here.
Update 5: Popular Twitter bot Breaking News On has turned to FriendFeed to post updates about this issue.
Update 6: LiveJournal also says they were hit by a DDOS attack.
Update 7: Wow, this is bad. Facebook developers reported a loss of as much as 75% of their traffic today due to timeouts. Check out http://developers.facebook.com/news/?tab=updates and http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic/?id=39155 for more details. Facebook also confirmed they were under a DDOS attack.