The Day Social Media Simply Froze!

What did you do while Twitter was out for two hours?
Switch to Facebook?
Was your profile available there?
No?
My goodness Social Media froze and all apparently for one blogger!

An orchestrated attack yesterday on several sites caused a two hour blackout on Twitter and degraded service on Facebook. Even Google was hit, but defended itself and is now assisting other companies to investigate the attack.

It now appears that all of this was to annoy one user, a pro-Georgian activist blogger known as Cyxymu, Cyxymu has previously been critical of the Russian government over the war in the South Ossetia region and their handling of it.

A botnet (networks of home and business computers which have been infected ready to launch such an attack) was directed to request the bloggers profile on multiple sites where he has profiles/a presence. The requests were made so quickly that the sites came to their knees, this is know as a DOS (Denial of Service) attack.

Now whilst this might all sounds like a bunch of IT freaks trying to annoy each other (with huge consequences) to most people, this is where it gets a bit “Cold War” like. The blogger himself blamed Russia in an interview with the Guardian newspaper:

“Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I’m certain the order came from the Russian government”

So should we be prepared for more outages like this when somebody annoys someone else? Probably, Iis the best answer…

During that time you’ll have to find something to do when all your Social Media platforms grind to a halt… Some Twitter users have posted what they did here, my personal favourites include:

• ForeignRobot #whentwitterwasdown I didn’t know who to tell about the little, insignificant events in my life. It was tragic. (Seriously.)
• JustinSherwood #whentwitterwasdown I went to the beach and there was no one to tweet about it.
• Akiti_littles #whentwitterwasdown i wanted to find the hacker n deal with him myself!
• ElizaBatten #whentwitterwasdown i watched the news all day just to get updates on when it will come back up.. lol
• classic_lbd #whentwitterwasdown

  I sat here and refreshed the page for three hours.

• elefantjon #whentwitterwasdown i thought it was the apocalypse
• SaintEmily #whentwitterwasdown I was shouting at my laptop and decided to use facebook like everyone else causing that to break too

There’s thousands of things people did… What would you do if your favourite website went down?

Personally for me it’s the BBC News first thing in the morning with coffee, if that went down – well… erm… I’d drink my coffee and have to start reading my inbox How about you?