Whoa, Twitter just got hacked!

December 17, 2009 in The Internet | 4 comments

So there I was about to answer @heatheringemar’s lovely supportive tweet about my cake-resistance efforts tonight, as well as tweeting my previous post, when Twitter suddenly inexplicably fell over. No fail whale, no nothin’, just suddenly I couldn’t get through.

Didn’t think anything of it though until I saw this post show up on JournalFen’s Fandom Lounge community–from which userinfosolarbird has concluded that Twitter’s apparently suffered a name service hack. From what the JF poster saw before Twitter vanished completely, it looked like a group in Iran tried to take over the site. One expects in retaliation for Iranian students trying to use Twitter as a protest mechanism. Dara doublechecked by trying to get data off of Twitter’s nameservers, and yeah, they were reporting bad hosts and everything before Twitter just dropped completely off the net.

Anyway, y’all, if you can’t get through to Twitter tonight, this is very probably why. I don’t envy Twitter’s support team right now; they must be having a very stressful night!

ETA: Dara has more tech-oriented details over here.

ETA #2: And we’re back! We now rejoin your regularly scheduled tweeting, already in progress.

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4 comments

  1. Heather Ingemar’s avatar

    Heather Ingemar on December 18, 2009 at 10:34 pm

    Twitter’s problem was just so weird! I think I logged off before it happened, but hearing the reports of other twitter-peeps… It’s just weird! lol.

    1. annathepiper’s avatar

      annathepiper on December 19, 2009 at 2:00 am

      Yeah, I just barely missed the direct fun myself! I only got the evidence of what had happened via Fandom Lounge and then Dara’s own investigatory pokings. :)

      I’m glad they got it resolved quickly. Dara was thinking somebody is so VERY FIRED if Twitter’s DNS records were that easily hackable.

  2. Heather Ingemar’s avatar

    Heather Ingemar on December 20, 2009 at 4:12 pm

    No kidding.

    If Twitter had been down for any length of time, I would have gone into withdrawls. :P

    1. annathepiper’s avatar

      annathepiper on December 22, 2009 at 9:35 pm

      Ha, I know the feeling! It’s mitigated for me somewhat in that I’m also on Facebook and several forms of blogging… but there’s just something about Twitter. :)

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