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Duck and cover, the sky is falling, Twitter was down.

August 7th, 2009 written by Heidi Cool

Read The Story of the Fail Whale

Like so many other people around the world, I woke up yesterday morning to discover that Twitter wasn't working. "Oh well", I thought, "I'll just check it later." Then I went back to the tasks at hand.

Later in the day Twitter was back up, a bit wobbly, but mostly functional. Bloggers everywhere were talking about the outage—the result of a denial of service attack (DoS)—that also impacted Facebook and other sites. Problems continue today.

What surprised me most wasn't that Twitter went down, but that so many people were making such a big fuss—though here I am joining in. It reminded me of the days back on Pownce, when we'd see all the Twitter users suddenly return to Pownce so they could post messages about seeing the Fail Whale instead of their Tweets. In the summer of 2008, we Pownce users also saw our share of White Screens of Death or images of Admiral Ackbar. Network outages on Pownce, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, etc. were annoying. They made us grumble. But they weren't unexpected. We knew that every now and again something would cause an outage and we'd just need to communicate through other channels until it was back up.

Yesterday though was another story. In addition to the usual grumblings, there was a tremendous amount of media and blog coverage hyping the event. While two years ago this would have been seen as an inconvenience to all of those nerds (like me) who are jabbering online all the time, this week it was seen (by some) as a major communication break-down. Coverage was so extensive, that the Twitter Status report about the event is now the #2 search engine result (out of 97,000,000) for a Google search of 'denial of service attack.' (Which just goes to show that in-bound links have a tremendous impact on search engine optimization.)

To some extent the uproar is understandable. Twitter has seen tremendous growth in the past year. While most Internet users still aren't yet Tweeting, millions are. Twitter has become a way for many to keep in touch around the world and people have come to rely on it as a necessary tool for communication. This week's event was a good reminder that we can't fully rely on any service in particular. Systems will go down, and we should be prepared.

So what do we do when Twitter (or Facebook or whatever) goes down?

I think the main thing to do is to plan ahead. Don't concentrate on just one service. As we Powncers learned, a service can go down for a few hours, or it can shut down permanently. If there are core people, with whom you regularly communicate on Twitter, create a back-up plan. Exchange e-mail addresses, friend them on Facebook, Flickr, Plurk, StumbleUpon and other channels. Bookmark their blogs and Web sites on Delicious. If you create enough back-up channels, then you'll always have an alternative way to reach them—unless the Internet goes down entirely. If that happens we can always go back to using carrier pigeons.

A wee sampling of the many stories about the Twitter outage

• Could you be responsible for the Twitter outage?
• Ongoing denial-of-service attack
• Security experts scramble to decipher Twitter attack
• Twitter and Facebook DDoS Attacks Targeted One Man
• Twitter Downtime: What Did You Do Instead?
• Twitter, Facebook DDoS Attack Targeted One User
• Twitter is Down: Defending Against DoS Attack
• Twitter Outage Moves Into Day 2
• What Did You Do The Day Twitter Almost Died?

Topics: Social Media Blog

Tags: denial of service, news, outage, Twitter