Twitter by far can be considered one of the largest social websites, it boast over 500 million active users and generating 340 million tweets daily and over 1.6 million billion searches per day (Twitter). So what has been going with Twitter? If you are a Twitter user you were one of those disconnected from the world. For those who are not Twitter users they have had two major incidents in the last two months and a one third in 2010 or just what I was able to find. These incidents affected most or all of its users. The first incident occurred July 26 and I will discuss that in details later on, preceding this incident there was one there was a black out on June 21 but Twitter is not disclosing what happened.
The incident on July 26 according to VP for Engineering Mazen Rawashdeh said the problem was caused by an “infrastructural double-whammy” at its data center. The data centers are designed to be redundant, what is noteworthy is that two parallel systems failed nearly at the same time (LIEBERMAN, 2012). The fourth incident that I found Lieberman commented on his article that according to Twitter this incident was attributed to a “cascading bug”, which essentially is a software problem that spread across its systems. Twitter has become the central source of socially aggregated information (Cohen, 2012). Cohen says that Twitter is the first place I look when there is a story worth following. The first place he looks for opinions, and the first place I go to share. Twitter has become the beating pulse of the Internet, and an outage such as todays shows this in the most intimate and immediate of ways according to Cohen.
In my opinion a double failure seems to be a rare event which for me is hard to believe, what I think is more feasible is that someone found a vulnerability which caused the double failure. I think Twitter does not want to admit this happened for the second time in a two year span that someone was able to penetrate their systems. Back in September 21, 2010 Twitter suffered from is called a "security exploit". The security exploit that caused problem was caused by cross-site scripting (XSS). Cross-site scripting is the practice of placing code from an untrusted website into another one (Twitter: Here's What Happened With That Bug This Morning, 2010). In this case, users submitted Java script code as plain text into a Tweet that could be executed in the browser of another user. The system in this case was not down but it more of a prank as it was turning Tweets into different colors and causing other errors.
A breach in a system are not to uncommon, a fine example happened this week to GoDaddy. GoDaddy was down for about six hours following an attack by @AnonymousOwn3r using SQL Injection. Of course GoDady has denied that it was an attack, according to the official statement released by Go Daddy CEO, Scott Wagner, “The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a ”hack” and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.” (Vaughan, 2012 ). Vaughan said that in a article by Wired Magazine said that one change made by GoDaddy was to point the GoDaddy DNS to Verisign – effectively letting a competitor manage the GoDaddy DNS.
No matter what happened in the case of Tweeter or GoDaddy the truth would never be known, corporations are never going to admit the truth. I think by now we all know that security beaches are not a myth.
References:
Twitter: Here's What Happened With That Bug This Morning. (2010, September 21). Retrieved Septemeber 17, 2012, from Business Insider.
Cohen, R. (2012, July 26). When Twitter Goes Down, So Does the Social Web. Retrieved September 17, 2012, from Forbes .
LIEBERMAN, D. (2012, July 26). UPDATE: Twitter Says System “Double-Whammy” Caused Blackout. Retrieved September 16, 2012, from Deadline. Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved September 16, 2012, from Wikipedia. Vaughan, D. (2012 , September 14). GoDaddy Outage – What Happened? Retrieved September 17, 2012, from Web Host Industry Review.
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