By now, Twitter users are back Twittering to their hearts’ content. Just a few hours ago, they were knocked off the popular microblogging site by a denial-of-service attack that likely originated in Russia or the Republic of Georgia. Although not yet confirmed, it’s likely that the nefarious hackers routed tons of traffic toward Twitter, overwhelming it, and knocking it out of commission.
Facebook wasn’t offline, but users experienced a slowdown, which the site blames on a denial-of-service attack. No word yet if the two were connected.
For many out there who dismiss the 140-character Twitter posts as meaningless bunk, why is this a big deal? Because Twitter has begun to play a critical role in communications. Looking beyond the global success the service has had coming off of protests in Iran, many businesses are now using it to keep in close contact with their clients and subscribers.
Furthermore, writing for PC World, Tony Bradley says “the outcry over the Twitter outage is indicative of just how far the social network has come in terms of overall reliability, and also illustrates just how many people depend on Twitter as a source of information, or entertainment, or communication.”
Bradley says that Twitter has already become too important of a p.r. and marketing tool to experience this sort of outage without suffering from it. He says Twitter needs to do something right away to prevent similar attacks, and perhaps more importantly, companies that use the site will need a business plan that addresses the problems such an outage might cause.
