For the first time in a long time, Twitter is down. No Fail Whale, no slowness with the site barely loading and the css all messed up…nothing. Zip. Nada.
On their status blog (powered by Tumblr) they note:
Site is down
We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.
While it’s good that they posted that status, it is a bit odd. Most of their status posts (even posts that say there are problems) have a little more about what is going on. The lack of ant detailed information here suggests something is really wrong and they have no clue. Or…they do have a clue but don’t want to say because it could damage them as a company if word got out.
Either way. It’s interesting. Twitter has become a lot more reliable in recent months (dating back to 2008) and most of the downtime has been forgotten. Then “The Big One” hits.
Stay tuned.
By the way, this is the firs post I wrote with my iPhone. So please forgive any typos. 
Update: So it turns out that today’s events were part of a DDoS attack on multiple social media outlets. Mashable reports that Twitter was not the only victim and that the incident will be investigated by Twitter, Facebook and Google.
DDoS attacks have been around forever, but this is the first one in a long time I can remember hitting this many high profile sites at once. There’s usually another reason for such an attack and it may not be known for quite a while. Of course, the attacks may not be over either. Stay tuned for more. As soon as attackers smell blood in the water, there’s bound to be more to come.
Did you experience the Twitter downtime? What did you do during the blackout? Where did you go?
