Why Twitter went down

There’ve been a lot of theories flying around about why Twitter and other services went down yesterday. I’ve heard rumors about it being linked to political tension between Georgia and Russia, others blame Iran for the outages.

Anyone who’s saying where the attack is coming from can only base their conclusions on pure speculation. There is no real data to prove who’s behind it, and if there would be any clue about the origins of this attack, it would be in the access logs on the victim servers.

It doesn’t really make sense for *any* government to launch such a DDoS attack just to silence somebody, anybody. An attack can last from a few minutes to a few hours – and after that what? Everything is back to normal, all communications are possible again. Personally, I don’t see any advantage that a government would achieve by disrupting access to Twitter or Facebook for 2 or 3 hours.

The only thing that I’m sure is going to happen after these incidents is that Twitter will gain even more popularity as a result. Everybody’s talking about it, the story is all over the news, all over the world – so the only thing that will happen is that Twitter will be even more popular after this.

UPDATE: We’ve been contacted by quite a few journalists asking about this case, and about Cyxymu – some commentators believe the attack was directed against him. With regard to individuals, I’m sure that governments or intelligence agencies have more direct and efficient methods for silencing somebody, if that was the case. DDoS-ing social networks doesn’t make sense, it is like using a tank to kill a mosquito.

Also, it’s worth noting that Cyxymu only had about 100 followers on Twitter when the attacks started – so I am wondering how big his influence really was to even consider him as the root cause of the DDoS attacks.

People will always be in love w ith conspiracy theories. It would be nice after incidents like this if everyone put the energy they have into securing systems, rather than generating more hot air.