Social Media Meltdown

The Social Media realm has in fact been hit by the DDoS attack.

The more popular social network sites have been experiencing longer load times and inaccessibility to some of their services. Twitter users were the first to be denied access to the site. This resulted in more traffic being directed to Facebook, which was already having troubles of its own.

This has caused them to point their fingers to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack – the work of hackers. Infected sites include Livejournal as well. Related applications such as Tweetmeme, Tweetdeck and Facebook connect are also encountering big issues.

This is what the different representatives of the affected sites have to say:

Twitter

“As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.”

Facebook

“Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users,” a Facebook spokesperson told InternetNews.com. “We have restored full access to the site for most users … We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”

Livejournal

“As some of you may know, LiveJournal has been under attack this morning from 6:00am PST until ??? We have taken steps to mitigate the DDoS but some users may still experience site connectivity problems. We are aware of these issues, and would like to take this moment to explain we are doing everything we can to keep the site up and running 100%, but some jobs / notifications / RSS feeds / Email notifications are not working 100% as expected. This is due in part to the steps we have taken to just allow the site to be on-line at this time.

We are aware of the problems and will be keeping a close eye on them to ensure that they do begin to function properly when the time is right. LJ may behave a little quirky for the time being, please bear with us…

Thank you for your understanding with this situation…”