A social media nightmare: when Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and more go down
It’s been an interesting morning in the wonderful world of social media, hasn’t it? First, Twitter went dark. Then Facebook started acting janky. Then we all sat there and just stared at the blinking cursors on our screens, with their telepathic messages of “get back to work.” But did we? No! Of course not– we went over to FriendFeed to discuss.
Twitter reported its outage being caused by a denial-of-service attack. (Quick explanation: when skilled nerds/hackers write programs to flood a server with tasks and requests, so that the server is overloaded and taken down.) What happens when we come to rely on the social web for all kinds of things, and then those services disappear? Sure, we can all merrily hop over to the next one, but as Allyson Kapin pointed out, to a certain degree, we’d all have to start over on building our networks. Our social capital translates across platforms, sure, but the physical reconnecting of users to users is one big pain in the butt.
