Thanks for all the email. Lots of it. Yes, today a group apparently celebrating the ESPN change of social media policy flooded the Twitter website and effectively shut it down. Gee, that certainly is brave.
Click here for the official Twitter notices. These "denial of service" attacks basically flood a website with traffic and block the normal flow of information. Click here for a C-Net update on the situation.
Sorry for the hassles, these things tend to come and go in the Internet world. No real theories yet on who would benefit from taking the time and expending the effort to block Twitter access.
We will update the Twitter status and any additional news that breaks on the new social media guidelines put in place on Tuesday by ESPN. We welcome your comments below.
18 comments:
I understand the business structure the ESPN wishes to distill, but in a time when their coverage is lacking, forcing their personalities to obtain permission to speak freely (huh?) just seems so totalitarian!
Let it flow ESPN or you will find Twitter scooping you on a regular basis.
I miss TNT's Race Buddy.
Looks like there is still some issues. Hope Twitter doesn't find out the DOS Attack came from Bristol, CT. How weird would that be?
:-)
CNN just announced that both Twitter and Facebook were hit by sophisticated hackers. Twitter is up and running in a limited capacity, but Facebook is still down for the count
What evidence do you have that this is ESPN-related? FYI there are massive protests happening in Iran, and the the government there has been trying to shut down Twitter or flood it for awhile. I think it's pretty reckless, if not naive, to tie this to the ESPN news.
I was kidding. Relax.
I see somebody sneaked in this afternoon I guess you have to keep on top of this site every minute of the day. I don't access twitter or facebook while I'm at work so I didn't know anything was up until now. Hopefully they'll have everything fixed by the time I get home today.
Twitters been a mess all day and some of us can't Tweet but others can. Now Murdoch is going to charger for EVERYTHING HE OWNS (most of media, including HULU) no more free anything from the web.
AND NFL is banning Twitter...so it's annoying this is all happening today.
Those who like hulu will have to get cable/dish like the rest of us.
This outage is HUGE and sophisticated hackers...across multiple platforms.
I never trusted those applications that let folks tweet to 6 locations at once. For crying out loud, even if you do business on the net, and Twitter, how many sites you need?
sigh.
Off for a nap.
It's not hackers at all. What these guys do is link computers together and then send them all to the same place.
It just distrupts the ability of the system to process information, it overloads it.
Denial of service means just that. Could be anyone for any reason. The strange thing is Twitter has no value strategically at all. Just a big texting service with links and pics.
In the past, this deal was supposed to have some sort of political meaning or protest.
Now, it's just to annoy.
JD
Actually hackers (and DOS attacks are one of the most basic, though effective, of hacking techniques) have long enjoyed the opportunity to annoy. They "win" just by showing they are smart enough to do what ever it is that they wanted to do. Very few serious hackers have had any sort of socio-political bent to their actions.
I run a very large community website and we have people trying to mess with us in all sorts of ways that have no possible outcome except to be annoying for the fun of it. Everyone needs a hobby I guess.
EVERYwhere I read and hear is calling it sophisticating hacker JD. So not sure why you think otherwise. From USA to UK similar comments from Twitter.
"Twitter says its site's blackout was caused by a "denial of service attack," which likely means a hacker used a herd of infected computers to send bad information to the site to overwhelmed it."
@Sophia,
I think J.D. had his tongue firmly implanted in his cheek when he said it was ESPN-related.
West Coast Kenny
Alameda, California
Trophy, did you crash Twitter now too?
LOL.
Couldnt resist.
--Wolfy
Still never got into the twitter phenomena though so I cant really speak one way or the other on ESPN's decision however, if they feel that it harms their bottom line, well, that is their decision to change their code of conduct accordingly.
I can see where some of the paranoia comes from by ESPN, coaches, etc but at the same time Twitter offers nothing that could not be found on the internet in a relatively similar amount of time. The only difference is with Twitter there is no way to really hide behind an anonymous label.
Facebook was slow earlier today but seems to be back up and running
Sophia,
Not everything is a conspiracy. Here is USA Today:
"Nothing on this scale has been seen since February 2000, when a 15-year-old Montreal youth, known as Mafiaboy, directed a bot network to cut off access to Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.com, Etrade, ZDNET and CNN. Upon being arrested, Michael Calce, now a security consultant, said he did it for bragging rights."
Until this unravels, it is just an annoying interrruption of service that makes little sense in the real world.
Maybe Mr. Calce has a little brother...
JD
Missed it all, I was at work and Twitter is blocked on the company PC's. Oh well guess there was a plus side being at work.
Sophia, email me please. Thank you.
I think Jeremy Mayfield is to blame for the Twitter outage. My sources say he accidentally snorted the social networking site.
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