Facebook & Twitter hit by hackers

Fwd Tech Friday 07 August 2009

Facebook and Twitter both suffered Denial of Service attacks yesterday

Micro-bloggers and social networkers took a bit of a battering yesterday as both Twitter and Facebook were hit by hackers. Twitter was hit so hard that the site was even taken offline for more than two hours!

The “Denial of Service” attack on Twitter and Facebook left many social networkers without the ability to access the sites. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on the company’s blog had this to say: “Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users.”

A similar dispruption also hit Facebook yesterday with the company admitting ””You may have had trouble accessing Facebook because of network issues related to an apparent distributed denial-of-service attack.”

A denial of service denial-of-service attack can take a number of forms but often involves a company’s servers being flooded with data in an attempt to force them offline.

It’s not the first time that these sites have been targeted, but with Twitter and Facebook’s memberships growing all the time (Facebook has more than 250 million active users and Twitter has 45 million), it’s a worrying development. It’s still unknown who was responsible for these hacks, but some news that will comfort work-dodgers is that Google’s reported to be helping the two companies investigate the source.

Did the Facebook/Twitter drop-offs effect you yesterday? Let us know in the comments section below…

User comments (446)

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Darren Flinders07 August 2009

I had trouble logging onto facebook around 6 o'clockish last night, but it wasn't playing up for long and soon got access.

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Marie07 August 2009

Most of yesterday this was all I kept getting while trying to do anything on Facebook HTTP Error Transport error (#12152) while retrieving data from endpoint `/ajax/updatestatus.php': Unknown HTTP error #12152

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Rachael07 August 2009

Facebook was down for most of the afternoon but it didn't bug me much, Twitter was down almost all day and I was close to suffering withdrawal symptoms!

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carole07 August 2009

I could not get on to Twitter for an an hour or two in the afternoon.

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Matty12 August 2009

i had trouble accesing facebook and when i got on it was extramlly slow and most apps didnt work

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rebecca24 March 2010

my facebook and msn dosen't work when i try logging in it says internet connection lost

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K29 April 2010

I am having trouble linking Twittwer to Facebook and vice versa. Facebook instructs me to log into the twitter account, but when I type my correct username & password, it gives me error msg saying that username or password is incorrect. But I entered correctly and can log into my Twitter account as a separate function. Any help with this msytery?

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sahil_ali1207 July 2010

iam sahil i want amy accuanbook fastt at face

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