DDOS Attacks Crush Twitter, Hobble Facebook

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

A DDOS attack this morning took Twitter out at the knees and they were down for hours. Rival Facebook faced a similar attack (likely related), but for the most part managed to remain online. Some users couldn’t access the site or post content, but the site remained online for most users.

Facebook’s statement:

Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users. No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users. We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.

We’ve also heard that Facebook and Twitter are working together to figure out exactly which 15 year olds are responsible for organizing the attack.

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