Categories: Social Media

Twitter goes down within hours of Anonymous’ threat against it

Twitter is down again after briefly recovering from a significant outage which saw the Fail Whale return for millions of users for over an hour on Sunday.

The finger is already being pointed at Anonymous, who, according to This is Xbox, threatened “The UN, Xbox Live, US Bank, Capital One, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube will be struck down” if Megaupload.com was not put back online within three days of January 19  (although @YourAnonNews tweeted that the group would not do so).

On Sunday Anonymous took down several Brazilian Government websites; Gizmodo is reporting that they also took down cbs.com and UniversalMusic.com. On Thursday they took down the US Department of Justices’s website and Universal Music’s as a reply to the shutting down of Megaupload.com.

We don’t know at this point if it was Anonymous that took Twitter down.  Twitter’s API status page is reporting (if we’re reading this right) that there was a significant increase in the number of calls, more than doubling the processing time from 481ms to 970ms on Sunday (perhaps a DDOS attack?).

While downrightnow.com showed that Twitter has been down at several point on the 22 of Jan and consistently for over an hour (at the time of writing).

On Saturday Twitter’s API’s availability fell to 83% at 9am GMT but returned to 100% for the next 10 hours.  But at 10pm GMT the API’s availability fell to 41.7% – an hour later it was had recovered to 83%.  After recovering slightly at midnight the main site went down again, although Twitter’s mobile site and Chrome TweetDeck app continued to operate.

[Update – Monday 23/Jan/2012 00:52] Twitter has updated it’s status blog to say “site issues” have been fixed, although they don’t mention that the cause of the issues were.

Update: This issue has been resolved.

Some users may currently be experiencing site issues; our engineers are working on resolving this issue.

Ajit Jain

Ajit Jain is marketing and sales head at Octal Info Solution, a leading iPhone app development company and offering platform to hire Android app developers for your own app development project. He is available to connect on Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

View Comments

  • However, I sincerely doubt this was Anonymous. Why? If you haven't noticed, when they attack a website, they let you know that they did it. This is the media pointing fingers at Anonymous, and trying to turn it's people against them like the sheep that you obviously think we are.

    • @jackiehammerfist Absolutely true that it wasn't them, and people have pointed out that it was more likely the match in the States that brought Twitter crashing down. The outage simply came at the same as the events in Brazil, and with Megaupload, CBS, and Universal. As we say above they pointed bout that they wouldn't take down one of their primary communication tools.

  • However, I sincerely doubt this was Anonymous. Why? If you haven't noticed, when they attack a website, they let you know that they did it. This is the media pointing fingers at Anonymous, and trying to turn it's people against them like the sheep that you obviously think we are.

    • @jackiehammerfist Absolutely true that it wasn't them, and people have pointed out that it was more likely the match in the States that brought Twitter crashing down. The outage simply came at the same as the events in Brazil, and with Megaupload, CBS, and Universal. As we say above they pointed bout that they wouldn't take down one of their primary communication tools.

  • Twitter goes down some of the time anyway due to many different errors, I think that even if there was a hack why should it be Anonymous that gets the finger pointed at.

  • Twitter goes down some of the time anyway due to many different errors, I think that even if there was a hack why should it be Anonymous that gets the finger pointed at.

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