Twitter Downed By Cyber-Thugs?

Twitter has been down most of this morning all over the world because, it says, of a <a href="http://status.twitter.com/post/157191978/ongoing-denial-of-service-attack">denial of service (DOS) attack</a>. Is it payback for Twitter's attempts at fighting malware?

Michael Hickins, Contributor

August 6, 2009

1 Min Read
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Twitter has been down most of this morning all over the world because, it says, of a denial of service (DOS) attack. Is it payback for Twitter's attempts at fighting malware?Indeed, given the magnitude of the attack, it wouldn't be at all surprising if this turned out to be payback by cyber-thugs for Twitter's recent moves to thwart malware and links to malicious sites.

And this is bigger than just Twitter. The outage is also affecting users who have their Twitter accounts linked to Facebook, preventing them from updating their pages, and affects companies that use Facebook to interact with customers.

The DOS is also affecting client applications that depend on the Twitter API, thus affecting any business that uses Twitter feeds as part of a communications strategy.

The irony here is that the increasing number of links between various Web services is undoing what the World Wide Web was created to avoid, which is a single point of communications failure.

So now our enemies know: to bring down the Americans, just take down Twitter.

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