EDI TIMES

(By: Wired.com)
By Eliot Van Buskirk
August 6, 2009
10:06 am
Categories: Social Media

Twitter was shut down for hours Thursday morning by what it described as an “ongoing” denial-of-service attack, silencing millions of Tweeters. It’s the first major outage the service has suffered in months and possibly the first ever due to sabotage. The outage appeared to begin mid-morning, EST, and affected users around the world.

The first official word about the outage came in a terse statement on Twitter’s status blog: “Site is down — We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.” That was followed by a more relaxed post on the main Twitter blog by co-founder Biz Stone, which nevertheless gave no indication of how the defense was going — or how long the service might be down.

“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack,” wrote Stone. “Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.”

A spokeswoman for Spark Capital, a major investor in Twitter, wouldn’t offer an official statement but implied that the company isn’t overly concerned about the outage and expects the site to come back online soon.

In a denial-of-service attack, a malicious party barrages a server with so many requests that it can’t keep up, or causes it to reset. As a result, legitimate users can only access the server very slowly — or not at all, as appears to be the case here.

Not only was the site down, but client applications that depend on the Twitter API could also not connect to the service, creating a complete Twitter blackout. According to June ComScore numbers Twitter has more than 44 million registered users and its user base has been growing rapidly for months as it becomes better known in the mainstream.

In the early minutes of the outage, we confirmed it in two New York boroughs and received word that it was down in Brazil as well. At that point, Twitter apparently didn’t know what had hit it. Subsequently readers saying they were in Russia, Denmark, Chile, the UK, Hong Kong, France and the Netherlands all weighed in below. Some were taking it in stride — “Too many toilets flushing tweets!” wrote one, in reference to a Wired.com story. Others urged the rest of us to “get a life.”

The world won’t come to a complete standstill as a result of the Twitter outage, of course, but its impact will be felt far and wide. The popular short messaging service has become an integral part of the communications ecosystem — our first question was, how do you confirm Twitter is down without Twitter? — and from its millions of inveterate users, we expect an outpouring of pent-up Tweeting when this gets sorted out.

An extended outage could have an impact on the spread of information — videos, music, and articles like this one — to say nothing of a growing number of businesses which depend on the service. The resiliency of the service as it begins to fashion a business plan and cater to enterprise customers would also be a concern to Twitter, which, in the glamorous tradition of Silicon Valley startups, makes no money but has big ambitions.

Twitter hasn’t had a significant outage since May 8, and has shown improved reliability since last year, when such outages were a regular occurrence. The last scheduled maintenance we know about was on June 16 — delayed by a day at the urging of the US State Department. This was during the height of the anti-government protests in Iran, much information was being disseminated to the world via Twitter, and the maintenance window, in the middle of the night in California, would have been prime daylight hours in Tehran.

We experienced a seemingly unrelated problem when accessing the Twitter blog through Google. The page greeted one Wired.com employee with an error message beginning “We’re sorry… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.” Another Wired.com employee was able to access the page as usual, with no virus warning. But with other users encountering the same error message, we wondered whether today’s Twitter outage was somehow related to Google’s virus warning. Judging from Twitter’s admission that it is under a denial-of-service attack, that appears to have been the case.

(By: Wired.com)

Christine Varney’s blunt assessment sent a buzz through the audience at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Varney, a partner at Hogan & Hartson and one of the country’s foremost experts in online law, was speaking at the ninth annual conference of the American Antitrust Institute, a gathering of top monopoly attorneys and economists. Most of the day was filled with dry presentations like «Verticality Regains Relevance» and «The Future of Private Enforcement.» But Varney, tall and professorial, did not hide her message behind legalese or euphemism. The technology industry, she said, was coming under the sway of a dominant behemoth, one that had the potential to stifle innovation and squash its competitors. The last time the government saw a threat like this—Microsoft in the 1990s—it launched an aggressive antitrust case. But by the time of this conference, mid-June 2008, a new offender had emerged. «For me, Microsoft is so last century,» Varney said. «They are not the problem. I think we are going to continually see a problem, potentially, with Google.»

Coming from Varney, it was a particularly damning comparison. As an attorney who represented Netscape in the late 1990s, she was instrumental in painting Bill Gates and company as overeager bullies. Now, Varney was suggesting that Google was repeating Microsoft’s expansionist behavior. Instead of dominating the desktop, Varney said, Google was starting to colonize the emerging cloud-computing industry, amassing «enormous market power» and potentially creating an ecosystem that customers would be powerless to escape. She acknowledged that her remarks might ruffle some feathers at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. «If any of my colleagues or friends from Google are here,» she said, «I invite you to jump up and scream and yell at me.»

Nobody took her up on that offer. But it is safe to assume that plenty of Googlers were jumping and screaming six months later when President Obama appointed Varney head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, making her the government’s most powerful antimonopoly prosecutor. On May 11, during her first public speech on the job, Varney made it clear that her stance had not changed much since her presentation at the conference: She planned to take a forceful approach to applying the nation’s antitrust laws. «In the past, the antitrust division was a leader in its enforcement efforts in technology industries, and I believe we will take this mantle again,» she said. She did not mention Google by name, but there was little doubt to whom she was referring.

Ever since its founding 11 years ago, Google has seen itself as one of the Good Guys. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin conceived their company as a kind of public trust. «We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free, and unbiased access to high-quality information,» they wrote in the run-up to Google’s IPO five years ago, a goal that requires «a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good.» They created a touchy-feely work environment with perks like onsite laundry facilities and free food. Prospective hires were grilled on not just their technical expertise but also their ethics—whether they were «Googley.» Google’s self-image was pithily summed up in its famous founding credo: «Don’t be evil.»

For most of its history, investors, users, and tech gurus shared Google’s view of itself. After all, the company’s rise to prominence—on the back of search algorithms so powerful and elegant they changed the Internet forever—is a case study in heroic entrepreneurialism. Its long-tail business model gives even the smallest Web sites a chance to make money. It routinely creates and distributes great products for free, even when there is no obvious benefit to the company. Its spirit of openness and collaboration laid the groundwork for the mash-upable, user-generated modern Web.
But recently, Google’s size and ambitions have begun to obscure its halo. Advertisers have watched nervously as the company’s share of the search-advertising market has jumped to 75 percent from 50 percent over the past three years. In 2007, Google attracted a yearlong antitrust review from US and European regulators after it announced plans to acquire online ad firm DoubleClick. In 2008, the DOJ swatted down a search-ad deal Google had made with Yahoo, arguing that it «would have furthered [Google’s] monopoly.» The company is currently under investigation by the DOJ for its ambitious book-scanning project, which aims to make every book ever published searchable on Google. And the Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether the Apple board seats held by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and board member Arthur Levinson violate federal antitrust law.

For much of its history, Google has responded to most criticism with two words: Trust us. The company has repeatedly persuaded skeptics that its immensity is a mere byproduct of its altruistic mission and that the algorithms it uses to organize the Internet, while proprietary, are objective and benevolent. But in an economy destroyed by bad faith, secretive formulas, and complicated mathematics, trust is in short supply, and Google’s assurances are losing their persuasive power. More than 15 years ago, federal regulators began making Microsoft the symbol of anticompetitive behavior in the tech industry. Now, a newly activist DOJ may try to do the same thing to Google.