Facebook/Twitter/LiveJournal Service Attack Targeted at Georgian Blogger

A
ll day Thursday three social media sites, Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal, were victims of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). It first started with Twitter and then moved to the others. Facebook initially didn’t say it was hit by a DDoS in its first press release but then later said: “Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users [...] No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users. We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.” Users on Facebook earlier in the morning, including myself, noticed pop-up error messages while doing simple tasks like viewing photos and commenting.







Twitter also released a statement saying, “As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness.” As of this morning, Twitter seems to be back up and running as usual with only slight hiccups.

It may not be a coincidence that all three social media sites were attacked at almost the same time, but hopefully we’ll find out more soon.