The NewsDemon Blog

Late last week was not a pleasant one for many Twitter users as the site was hit by a massive DDos attack which made sure the site went down for at least a couple of hours. It did come back up though. However, many newsgroup discussions are around how Twitter just hasn’t felt the same ever since it’s been back up.
The service was unavailable for hours last Thursday and was not running smoothly Friday.

The attack seems to have been a politically motivated one where the attacker wanted to silence a user from Georgia who was using popular social networking sites
as a base to voice his issues. The massive cyber attack against the Georgian blogger that caused a global knockout of Twitter slowed several other popular web sites; Facebook and LiveJournal

While the intention might have been to “silence” one user, it had resulted in Twitter being rendered unusable. Some USENET newsgroups represent the first examples of how messy flame wars could get. Some of the most historic flame wars were created by some of the first to join the USENET. However, due to the way that USENET works, the entire network could not have been affected by a DDoS attack as it was with Twitter.

“I am not happy that [my] blogs were attacked,” said the blogger, speaking on his cell phone from outside the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. “But it is good that I get famous. I think Obama knows about me, because he likes Internet news.”

Giorgy said he was surprised and dismayed that the attack had brought down Twitter all over the world.

Facebook said Friday that the bloggers pages at Facebook and LiveJournal were targeted in the attack. It said it had isolated the trouble and that service for its more than 250 million users had returned to normal.

Just like USENET newsgroups, millions of people have come to rely on Twitter and the like to express their innermost thoughts and to keep up with world news and celebrity gossip. An estimated 10 million people around the world use Twitter, while Facebook has around 250 million active members. Normal service has been restored to all sites in the days following the cyber attacks.