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So far it’s proving to be a bad week for Twitter.
Firstly American based firm TechRadium decides to sue them on grounds of patent infringement. Their claims have some justifiable basis but its unlikely they will win due to the fuzzy arena they are trying to claim virtual ownership over. Many online ventures fall in the same bracket as Twitter (the area of contest regards the distribution of widespread alerts and messages) and unless I am mistaken dont actually pose a threat to TechRadium’s central business model. After all is the US Army really going to stop using their service and start using Twitter to update its personnel?
Time will tell on that front and no doubt this will be a costly and drawn out battle.
Then to further Twitter’s woes the site got taken down today after a suspected co-ordinated denial-of-service attack. Attacks of this nature involve sending huge amounts of data in the target’s direction to (in simple terms) overload their systems.
As a precaution Twitter took itself offline and it is currently unclear when normal service will resume.
Sadly with this kind of attack the culprit is rarely found and its only a matter of time before they pick a new target.
To read more about this click here to read the BBC’s article online
Normally whenever we add an article here it updates our Twitter account accordingly. Except for today. The irony of this admittedly brings a small smile to my face.
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written on August 6th, 2009 5:12 pm
It appears that Twitter is back up and running already although in these kinds of instances it is not unusual for service to be flakey for a few days while they tweak the system to hopefully ward off further attacks.
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