Twitter outage caused by DDoS attack

News: Twitter outage caused by DDoS attack

At roughly 1:00am last night, the Twitisphere fell silent (or at least significantly fewer twitters). ISPs in Arbor Networks’ Internet Observatory detected a dramatic drop in Twitter traffic because of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that was happening.

And though you could not follow the outage via tweets, Twitter’s blog announced the popular site was under DDoS.

Where did all the tweets go?
• We generally don’t see a lot of data (i.e. it takes thousands of tweets to match the bandwidth of a single video), but 55 ISPs in Arbor’s Internet Observatory were exchanging roughly 200 Mbps with Twitter before the DDoS.
• Then traffic dropped to a low of 60 Mbps around 10:40am and began climbing after that.
• As of 1pm EDT, Twitter traffic was still down by 50% at 150 Mbps (normally we see close to 300 Mbps for this time of day).

Dr. Craig Labovitz, Chief Scientist at Arbor Networks has written the following blog post about it and a graph showing the dramatic drop in traffic:

http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2009/08/where-did-all-the-tweets-go/

ENDS

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