Twitter went down today at the hand of a denial of service attack (alongside Facebook and Livejournal; the latter has also reported an attack). In the old days, you’d shrug it off and go and look at something else. Today, Twitter is such an integral part of the landscape, and some people’s businesses, that it made BBC News and was commented on all over the Internet.
The headlines are highly strung to say the least:
- Twitter Attack Brings a Day Without Social Media (Gawker)
- A Day (Or Hour) Without Twitter Sucks (Twitterrati)
- Twitter Goes Down, Down, Down (Technologizer, who delightfully illustrated their post with an image of an anvil falling on a bird)
The stress of it all made TechCrunch come over all Mr Humphries:
Meanwhile, away from the hilarity, Dave Winer’s developing rssCloud and people are beginning to talk about Laconi.ca. The only model that makes sense is a distributed one: it’s a fundamentally harder problem to bring down a decentralized network, because there isn’t a single point of failure. So far, for example, DNS has remained pretty robust. As regular readers will know, I strongly believe there are very solid business and development reasons for going decentralized, too.
The web is becoming social, and those conversations are becoming more and more important. A malicious user or group shouldn’t be able to take down our conversation platform – or have the ability to dictate its direction. It’s time to think about a better way to build the social web.
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