So you have a Twitter account, as you should; and for some reason Twitter was just down.  I have yet to see Twitter down, updates yes, down for the count, no!  Well, as it turns out on August 6th a group of… well just call them ‘hackers’ for now, from Abkhazia (a territory between on the eastern coast of the Black Sea) was responsible for the Twitter outage.

For most of the day Twitter was simply not available.  If you happened to get a page load, the next page view was sure to fail.  If you were one of the lucky ones who was able to log in, your tweet never made it live.  And if you used an API or 3rd party platform for tweets, DM’s or following/un-following etc, you were sure out of luck.  This includes the mobile apps as well, which I personally take advantage of.

When Thursday morning came around and I was not able to access Twitter, I thought it was my internet connection.  After a few more tries and few curse words later I decided to try my G1 Twitter app; with no success.  At this point, I knew something went wrong with Twitter, what I didn’t know was that a blogger was responsible for the whole mess.

In Thursday denial of service attack (a malicious barrage of request for a single web site intended to take the site off the web) on Twitter millions of Twitter users were silenced.  However attackers took down Twitter specifically targeting a user by the name of Cyxymu and attempted to take down others.

“ According to CNET News.com, which got its information from a Facebook security executive, it appears that Cyxymu’s Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Blogger accounts were attacked simultaneously in a massive denial-of-service attack. Facebook, LiveJournal and Blogger were able to ward off the attack for the most part, but the assault brought Twitter to its knees for much of Thursday.”

“The culprits still haven’t been identified, CNET reported, although an Internet traffic expert quoted by the New York Times said the attack came from Abkhazia, a territory along the eastern coast of the Black Sea that’s in dispute between Russia and the Republic of Georgia.”

“And why was Cyxymu—a pro-Georgian blogger who “has long been viewed as an antagonist by some Russian supporters,” according to The Register—targeted? “To keep his voice from being heard,” the Facebook exec told CNET.”

Twitter is back up and running now but this just goes to show that a few bad apples can spoil the bunch.  This attack really made me think about the level of users who use Twitter the top or a top traffic producer for their site, product or service.  What if Twitter was gone, and never returned?  Honestly, if you relied on Twitter so much what would you do?

Let me put a twist on this… Let’s replace Twitter with Google.  What would you do if Google vanished?  Would 70%+ of your traffic vanish as well?  What’s your back-up plan?