Twitter, the fast-growing social media for trading short messages, suffered a prolonged attack Thursday, knocking the service out for hours in the morning and resulting in slow and intermittent service later in the day.
Facebook also experienced intermittent access problems.
Twitter said it was the victim of a “distributed denial of service,” or DDOS, attack, a disruptive tactic in which outsiders attempt to overload a Web site with huge numbers of computer-generated requests — even, for instance, to refresh a Web page.
Because sites have a limited capacity to handle such requests, a deliberate deluge can cause servers to respond slowly to legitimate users or not at all.
“It basically just shows that Twitter wasn’t spending the money to filter out DDOS attacks,” said John Pescatore, a security analyst at research company Gartner. Because Twitter is a consumer-oriented site, he said, it’s common that such sites learn the hard way because they “don’t invest in the reliability and the protection against threats that a business-grade service does.”
Twitter’s traffic and membership have exploded in the past year, rocketing to more than 20 million unique visitors in June from 600,000 a year earlier, according to Web ratings company ComScore Inc. Nielsen’s Web ratings service said Twitter reached nearly 10 percent of online users in June.
“Their popularity and their utility are beginning to make them a target for a lot of different kinds of malicious activity,” said Sarah Milstein, co-author of “The Twitter Book.” “You hate to say a denial of service attack legitimizes a site as a serious business, but I think in some ways it’s a significant milestone.”
Twitter came partially back online later in the day, but users reported spotty performance and many said they could not access the service on mobile devices such as iPhones and BlackBerrrys.
“We’re working to get back to 100 percent as quickly as we can,” said a post on the company’s site. But the site was still experiencing slowness nearly 12 hours later.
Twitter’s power to quickly and widely circulate short messages of up to 140 characters has been visible in many segments of business and media.
“For the people who use it, Twitter is becoming a primary alert system within the information economy, an editor of the live Web,” said Jay Rosen, a media professor at New York University.
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