‘Malicious’ cause paralyses Twitter
August 7th, 2009 - 6:28 pm ICT by IBNS
Aug 7 (IBNS) Twitter had a tough time to manage its site Thursday after it was revealed that it was battling a malicious cause.
It was discovered that Twitter was defending against a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS), in which the target is typically saturated with so many fake requests that the victim is unable to return legitimate ones.
DDoS attempts are difficult to defend against even for some established sites.
In a blog post, presumably hosted on an unaffected server, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone acknowledged the attack.
Stone said: Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.
Twitter was knocked offline about 9:15 a.m. EDT.
Pingdom, a site that tracks server uptime, indicates that Twitter was offline for about two and a half hours.
According to Netcraft, Twitter runs on an Apache Web servers hosted by Verio.
With the restoration of Twitter, tweets have resumed many of them about the outage.
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Tags: apache web servers, attempts, banks, biz stone, co founder, credit card payment, credit card payment gateways, ddos, denial of service, denial of service attack, ibns, server uptime, target, tweets, twitter, two and a half hours, verio