A cyber attack brought down twitter and caused the API to be yanked making it almost impossible to use the service for the past 12 hours (as of 4pm +10GMT) The Tweetlater site is completely offline. Twitter status stated that they were recovering from the attack and looking into causes, however testing of the service shows it still to be very unresponsive. This suggests a renewal of the attack.
This is becoming a regular occurrence, this not only is a threat to the data of the people using the service, it must be starting to damage the reputation of the twitter Twitter company itself. I am starting to wonder if Ev and the gang have grown too fast. They no longer seem to be able to control the interface. Instead of introducing new features, they really need to concentrate on consolidating what they have and make it more resilient to the attacks that have been plaguing it. They owe that to their userbase.
As one blogger said in a post last week: You would have to be crazy to build your business on the back of the twitter API.
Followup
Monday morning here in Australia and it’s still going on. Is this the worst one yet?
An Announcement on the Tweetlater page states the following:
Twitter API: The Twitter API is currently slow in responding. Performance of certain functions will be degraded. If the degradation is severe, please check if Twitter has posted any service notice on the Twitter Status blog.
SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT — PLEASE READ – Sunday, August 16th
>> Click Here To Open and Read the Announcement <<
The Twitter API is very unresponsive due to a renewed attack against Twitter. Automation processes are running, but backlogs may build up due to slow API response times. Tweets may publish after their scheduled times, and at times they may not publish at all and be put into a red error condition. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to alleviate the problem. We must rely on Twitter engineers to stabilize the Twitter API.
Announcement on Tweetlater Page (US Time) Sunday August 16 2009
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