Twitter DDoSed

Twitter was down for 3 hours yesterday afternoon as the site suffered under a DDoS attack.

Users throughout the world experienced failures as they tried to update about what was going on in their daily life, which has led to plenty of sniping about the site amongst the more cynical of the online press. What they have largely failed to recognise though is that it also impacted customers looking for help from many of the businesses that are now using the site to put a human face on customer service also.

Their status page reported the problem, and also that users were seeing the site being really slow as they recovered - something that I definitely experienced too:The attack was a year to the day that the conflict between Russia and Georgia started, and it's believed that this might be significant and the attack was actually a co-ordinated one against one anti-Russian blogger in Georgia across all social media sites.

And if an attack against one person can actually take Twitter down, that would show how fragile their defences really are - and it's something they'll have to address as they continue to grow.

The outage comes on the back of a number of teething problems after the new interface for the site launched, including a particularly odd glitch where all users were rendered anonymous as 'undefined' for a few minutes: