Blazing Minds

Those of us that use Twitter like a religion and visit the church of tweeting constantly will have noticed that over the last couple of days there has been some major problems with access, account editing and slowness of the twitter service.

It all started yesterday when the site went down, upon checking the Twitter Status it turns out that Twitter was going through a deniel-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.

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 (4:14p): Site latency has continued to improve, however some web requests continue to fail. This means that some people may be unable to post or follow from the website.

Even Tweetdeck was having problems due to the outrage, though TweetDeck is now running again, editing accounts and using Ouath is still sluggish to say the least.

Even TweetLater has an announcement of there website with regards to problems:

IMPORTANT SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT — PLEASE READ

1. To help Twitter in recovering from the Denial-of-Service attack, we have paused all Twitter account automation. In other words, at present no new follower checking is being done, no scheduled tweets are being posted, keyword alerts are paused, etc.
2. If you do not want a small avalanche of tweets posted on your Twitter account when service resumes, then please reschedule your tweets now for publishing on Monday or Tuesday (we have no idea how long the Twitter recovery will take).
3. Also, you will probably not be able to add a Twitter account or edit your Twitter account at present. It is because the Twitter API is not responding at the moment. The system will tell you your credentials are invalid, but it’s because it couldn’t check them against the API.
4. Features such as TweetCockpit, @Mentions & Retweets, DM Manager, Vet Friends/ Followers, etc., are also crippled by the API’s unresponsiveness.
5. We will remove this notice message as soon as we get the thumbs up from Twitter that they have fully recovered from the attack and we have resumed normal service.
6. Update: We have received word from Twitter that this outage could last well into Saturday.

So for the time been, it’s just a case waiting for the attack to be thwarted by the Twitter techies!

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3. Hello Mr Twitter Fail Whale! [Updated]
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This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 9:12 am and is filed under Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.