‘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.

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.

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!

I'm like...#DDoS ##DDoSAttack pic.twitter.com/8kHFPmkazU

— Tom Hall ☘ (@TomHall) October 21, 2016

When Twitter was down... pic.twitter.com/pF9XkIvCUa

— Oddschanger (@Oddschanger) October 21, 2016

*Earthquake happens, everyone texts each other "are you ok?"

*Twitter is down, everyone texts each other "are you ok?"

— Brandon Calvillo (@BJCalvillo) October 21, 2016

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

Way to go, Ecuador. This is what happens when we block Assange's internet access.

— Jacob Hemingway (@JacobUSMC1) October 21, 2016

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!

OMFG #TwitterDown #Survivor pic.twitter.com/iQULlyVunm

— Sarah GRONKowski (@Sbeezy28) October 21, 2016