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Twitter is Down, What to do?

Comments 10 by Rebecca Bollwitt

What does the population do when Twitter goes down? I’m not sure but hopefully they turn to blogs. This morning the microblogging service used by millions across the globe went down, and I’m not taking “Fail Whale” down.


Fail Whale Fan Club & What is Fail Whale

The entire site is unavailable (as well as services that connect to it) so the best place to go at a time like this is the Twitter Status Blog:

  • Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.
  • Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.
  • Thursday August 6th: “Ongoing denial-of-service attack – We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.” Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.
  • Thursday August 6th: “Site is down – We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly. Update: we are defending against a denial-of-service attack.”

    • Once they have the time to publish to the regular Twitter blog, updates will appear there as well.

    The morning hours on Twitter are usually rich with hot news topics of the day, and many just getting into work and publishing updates such as “why did I even come in today” or “the line up at Starbucks is huge this morning”. In case you’re missing Twitter, try watching “Real Life Twitter” once again. It’ll still make you giggle and ease of pain of not being able to Tweet at this time (and maybe commenting on a blog post will scratch that itch).

    Update: Here’s a bit more of an explanation about the nature of the outage (attack).


    HowStuffWorks.com

    A denial of service attack means that somewhere, somehow, an overload of computers is massively bombarding Twitter — making it impossible for them to manage regular traffic on top of this overload. This is similar to the attack notorious Canadian hacker Mafiaboy used to cripple Amazon.com and Yahoo years ago. Twitter is back up and running however services and programs that use its API (application programming interface) such as Tweetdeck, are having a hard time connecting. With the DEFCON hackers’ conference going on right now (and with Gawker, Facebook and Media Temple being other recent targets) fingers are pointing in all directions.

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    10 Comments  —  Comments Are Closed

    1. AlThursday, August 6th, 2009 — 8:11am PDT

      Friend Feed is still up. http://friendfeed.com/bokashiman

      Sometimes I like it more than Twitter http://friendfeed.com/miss604

    2. PhillyMacThursday, August 6th, 2009 — 8:21am PDT

      I’m trying to use friendfeed – but it’s more of a desperate measure.

    3. cbjerrisgaardThursday, August 6th, 2009 — 8:29am PDT

      My guess is most people refresh till it comes back up. Usually only takes a minute or so. Half the time I’m working on other things so I just go back to those and wait.

      @cbjerrisgaard

    4. Miss604Thursday, August 6th, 2009 — 8:41am PDT

      Yeah it was down for a few hours today due to the nature & severity of the outage (e.g. not just a Fail Whale/over capacity issue)

    5. Duane StoreyThursday, August 6th, 2009 — 8:49am PDT

      I love those little peek-a-boo bookmarking things you have. Cool.

    6. MazyarThursday, August 6th, 2009 — 1:19pm PDT

      Real-life Tweeter was funny 🙂

    7. VancityAllieThursday, August 6th, 2009 — 3:34pm PDT

      Great post! Been wondering what the heck has been going on all day with Twitter!

    8. JohnThursday, August 6th, 2009 — 5:11pm PDT

      What a great post. You are a real geek chic!

    9. Robert FinlaysonThursday, August 6th, 2009 — 11:14pm PDT

      I’m in Las Vegas now and DEFCON finished on Sunday (August 2nd). Although some of participants stayed in Vegas for Diggnation, and even fewer for the Star Trek convention this weekend, the coincidence factor is the only logical link to DEFCON.

    10. AC MoneySunday, August 9th, 2009 — 10:21pm PDT

      I just cried and rocked myself to sleep.

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