Infinite Path

Twitter may have only been unavailable to users for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon but officials at the company are likely to take Thursday’s denial-of-service (DOS) attack upon their website extremely seriously in the days and weeks to come, as they try to gage the consequences of the event.

In being targeted by a co-ordinated, large-scale DOS attack (which usually involves flooding servers with data in an attempt to render them useless), Twitter was in good company yesterday, with other websites affected including Google and Facebook.

However, the attack was particularly damaging for Twitter, which has hardly left the headlines since it boomed into public awareness at the beginning of this year.

Twitter has worked hard to build its brand from the bottom up and its transformation from a simple social media tool to a vital means of communication that for many people has replaced the need for email has been startling. The manner in which it has evolved into a key marketing tool is also highly significant.

Viewed in this context, the loss of service for even a couple of hours on a Thursday afternoon is a major event. To make matters worse, it would seem that other big names in the online world were far better equipped to deal with the attack. Google released a statement announcing that their “systems prevented substantive impact” to their services, whilst Facebook was simply degraded for a short period of time.

The bad news is that this attack is unlikely to be the last, as Twitter continues to grow in popularity and the media buzz surrounding it increases in intensity. Whilst the co-founders of the service are undoubtedly ecstatic that Twitter has become a household name, they’ll also be aware that this fame leaves them vulnerable to attack by those who deliberately target websites perceived to be of value.

The exact motive for this latest DOS attack remains unclear and Twitter has been reluctant to speculate on the issue. However, regardless of the reasons for the DOS, it has highlighted precisely how vulnerable the services that we use everyday are. It is easy to assume that the online tools we take for granted and rely upon for communication and conducting business are invincible but this is quite obviously not the case.