"Yesterday, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google's Blogger were targeted yesterday by a person or persons unknown in a denial-of-service attack (DDOS) which attempted to silence the voice of one individual. The target in question was a Georgian blogger who goes by the name of "Cyxymu" online, according to recent reports from CNET. While Google withstood the attack, the other services suffered. LiveJournal and Twitter went down completely and Facebook struggled throughout the day. As we now roll into day two of the "great social media outage of 2009," you may be surprised to learn that it's not over yet. Although Facebook and LJ have recovered, Twitter is still having issues. Not only was the site down once again early this morning, Twitter developers using the API are complaining the company is sending mixed messages by reporting that they're "back up" when in reality, the ecosystem of Twitter applications are, in many cases, still unusable. This morning, Twitter was once again taken down by the DDOS attack. According to Ken Godskind, Chief Strategy Officer for Alertsite, Twitter's website availability was less than 100% in the midnight, 3, 4, & 5 AM hours EST. As of 6 AM EST, the site has again recovered. Unfortunately, many third-party Twitter applications are still being affected." - Susan Beebe

And Twitter is down in strange and unpredictable ways. Seems that Twitter has real problems with network operations in general. API is working for some not others. I can even Tweet through the web from Safari, but not from Firefox on the same box. - John

What's interesting is that "whitelisted" IPs don't even work. They blocked everyone, regardless of status. - Jesse Stay

WOW, that's devastating for all API dependent applications - yikes! - Susan Beebe

I've had no issues with Twitter since it came back up yesterday afternoon. - Mathew™ aka Youngblood

twitter's web client users may not notice much now, but folks who develop and/or use twitter client apps that utilize twitter's API, like friendfeed, socialtoo, twitpic, tweetie, tweetdeck, seesmic, peoplebrowsr - are all affected!!!!! - Susan Beebe

Twitter's own services were affected today as well. It was very clear from watching Twitter.com, search.twitter.com, FriendFeed, Tweetdeck, and PeopleBrowsr, that there are bottlenecks and or drop points within twitter's own network. Tweets sent from API clients (TD, FF, PB, Seesmic et al) were being shown everywhere but twitter.com, and were foten slow getting to search.twitter.com. Myself, I was unable to post tweets throughout most of the day from Twitter.com, but successfully posted a moajority of the attempts from all 3 clients I was testing from (TD, FF, and PB). It did seem perhaps that Twitter was not blocking Tweetdeck clients as much as other applications. BUT, this may have been unintentional. The responses being seen at PB from the Twitter API were very unexpected. New code was immediately released at PB to deal with the new responses from Twitter. This improved tweet receipt and delivery several-fold. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I haven't noticed anything using TweetDeck. - Mathew™ aka Youngblood

Matthew, I tested extensively with all of the above apps this morning, and found that not all tweets were being sent or received by each of them. There were intermittent failures from each application. Interestingly, the most consistent failure was the twitter.com web site. I was virtually unable to tweet at all with that, and the few tweets that were accepted, were not delivered to API clients for at least 2 hours. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)