Twitter and Facebook down

Yup – it’s true. Twitter has experienced one of the longest outages in years, while Facebook has been experiencing intermittent disruptions for a number of minutes (becoming hours) already today.

The reason for Twitter’s down time is a “denial of service” (DoS) attack according to their status blog.

The reason’s for Facebook being down/disrupted are less clear, but there is some speculation that it is because of the flood of Twitter “refugees” who suddenly went onto Facebook because they could not access Twitter.

At WWW we do wonder if this is in any way related to a substantial Twitter API change made yesterday, although it is unlikely to be directly connected? And the question – “what would the motive be to attack Twitter with a DoS?” The best answer we could come up with is “a hacker who wants to brag to his friends that he was able to bring Twitter to it’s knees.”

We also had to chuckle imagining the Social Media crowd and “Twits” rushing to Facebook and then probably to RSS readers to get their regular information “fix.” Will be interesting to study the traffic flow patterns when things return to normal…