‘Oh God what am I going to do’: When Twitter was down with cyber attack
Hackers unleashed a complex attack on the internet through common devices like webcams and digital recorders and cut access to some of the world’s best known websites on Friday.
Hackers unleashed a complex attack on the internet through common devices like webcams and digital recorders and cut access to some of the world's best known websites on Friday, a stunning breach of global internet stability.
The attacks struck Twitter, Paypal, Spotify and other customers of an infrastructure company in New Hampshire called Dyn, which acts as a switchboard for internet traffic.
The attackers used hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices that had previously been infected with a malicious code that allowed them to cause outages that began in the Eastern United States and then spread to other parts of the country and Europe.
Twitter users went into a frenzy as they realised that they could not tweet about this catastrophe. After the servers came back up, users posted about how they spent their free time:
Twitter was down for three hours here. I ... went outside.
— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) October 21, 2016
Twitter was down so I had to leave my mom's basement & go seek validation for my horrible opinions from strangers at the mall.#twitterdown
— The Refined Ruffian (@CulturedRuffian) October 21, 2016
When #Twitter Goes Down!
— Tom Hall ☘ (@TomHall) October 21, 2016
I'm like...#DDoS ##DDoSAttack pic.twitter.com/8kHFPmkazU
When Twitter was down... pic.twitter.com/pF9XkIvCUa
— Oddschanger (@Oddschanger) October 21, 2016
*Earthquake happens, everyone texts each other "are you ok?"
— Brandon Calvillo (@BJCalvillo) October 21, 2016
*Twitter is down, everyone texts each other "are you ok?"
Twitter was down for most of the day. Unrelated, I have written a novel and learned the piano.
— Aidan Scanlan (@aidanscanlan) October 21, 2016
Everybody had their own theory on why the social networking giant had dozed off (and also how we could prevent such outages in the future)
#twitterdown
— Jacob Hemingway (@JacobUSMC1) October 21, 2016
Way to go, Ecuador. This is what happens when we block Assange's internet access.
I thought my I'd blocked #twitterdown
— CRICKET (@Sk3435) October 22, 2016
Twitter would never go down if @realDonaldTrump becomes president because he would, together with his son Barron, extreme-vet the servers.
— Alex Christensen (@AlejoEC) October 21, 2016
Some couldn't control their excitement when Twitter finally came back on
Coming back on twitter after it's been down all day pic.twitter.com/9k2xb7nKJ4
— Anthony Broome (@anthonytbroome) October 21, 2016
Relieved to learn that Twitter was down rather than that everyone I follow happened to block me at the same time.
— Peter Rojas (@peterrojas) October 21, 2016
Not being able to tweet about twitter being down was killing me.
— Nick (@NQS88) October 21, 2016
MY TWITTER IS BACK!
— Sarah GRONKowski (@Sbeezy28) October 21, 2016
OMFG #TwitterDown #Survivor pic.twitter.com/iQULlyVunm
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