So the big news of yesterday was that of Twitter’s and FaceBook’s problems. It seems that rouge hackers launched a politically motivated denial-of-service (DOS) attack against one particular blog. The fact that Twitter and FaceBook were affected was “merely” a side-effect.
What is really revealing is just how big of a deal this was. I read a good article talking about how people were freaking out during the event. This wasn’t 9/11 we were talking about, it was “the day Twitter was down”! A quote from that article I think sums it up quite nicely.
What may prove more lasting about the day social networking suffered its first major blackout is the degree to which people cared. Near-panic erupted in some corners of the Internet as people lost cherished links to their online friends, family members and news feeds.
I’ve said it a few times, but the speed in which social networking has grown in the last year is phenomenal. No way this event was as big of a deal two years ago or even one year ago.
During his monolouge tonight while commenting on the Twitter and FaceBook situation, Conan O’Breien kept saying “FaceBox” after a joke involving Sarah Palin and an X-Box. No word on if he was hacked.
