This wasn’t due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today. A ‘cascading bug’ is a bug with an effect that isn’t confined to a particular software element, but rather its effect “cascades” into other elements as well. One of the characteristics of such a bug is that it can have a significant impact on all users, worldwide, which was the case today. As soon as we discovered it, we took corrective actions, which included rolling back to a previous stable version of Twitter.Twitter VP of Engineering Mazen Rawashdeh • Formally denying that outside hacking was involved in Thursday’s downtime, hours after a hacker group took credit. Instead, they say it was a “cascading bug” that was to blame. So there’s that. (thanks @rmhrisk)
Here’s a graphic showing the prior hack UGNazi, which claims to have taken down Twitter today, managed to pull off on Cloudflare.
UPDATE: Twitter has officially denied that a hacker was involved, despite UGNazi’s earlier claims.
The hacker group UGNazi has claimed responsibility for crashing the social media site. During the attack, anyone searching for Twitter in Google or Bing would not have been able to find the website - the internet did not recognize it as website that existed.
Hacker Hannah Sweet, known as “Cosmo” and @CosmoTheGod on Twitter, claimed in an email that UGNazi took Twitter down for 40 minutes worldwide with a “distributed denial of service” attack.
Currently, Twitter is intermittently working - the attack is not over.
“They keep moving servers and we keep attacking it,” Sweet said in an email.
Sweet also said that the group attacked Twitter because of the site’s support of Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a bill that allows the federal government and private businesses to share information about possible cyber threats.
The group also claimed to take down CloudFlare in an elaborate hack that involved convincing an AT&T customer service rep to forward an engineer’s voice mail to a different number, and then using this to break his two-step authentication on Gmail. (ht @BuzzFeed)
UPDATE: Twitter has officially denied that a hacker was involved, despite UGNazi’s earlier claims.
Business Insider reports Twitter is down; tweets about it.
(h/t ShortFormBlog)
In which Stacy points out the best part about Twitter being down and I just happen to have it up in my inoperable Twitter window:
Looking for a new Twitter avatar that sticks it to the man? Try one of these bad boys, created by cartoonist Adam “@apelad” Koford. Some are beautiful. Some are subversive. All modify and add upon the basic the shape of the Twitter logo (well, the old one) and break their branding guidelines. And let’s face it, that’s what we want out a Twitter avatar.
I’ve been meaning to write a piece about this. We were talking earlier about the daily gaffes and Twitter and the news cycle, and I’m totally as much to blame for helping that atmosphere as anyone. We all engage in tweeting and commenting and hammering these guys when they say something off message. It’s created a crisis for political journalism. People genuinely do not think it is in their interest — both White House and campaign officials, both campaigns, it’s not a partisan thing at all, it’s Democrats and Republicans — they genuinely do not believe it’s in their interest to talk in an unguarded way. Because even if they trust you to get the context 100 percent right, it doesn’t matter, because they know that a liberal or conservative blog, or a campaign ad, will just grab something out of context and run with it and create some damaging meme.
I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and it’s worse now than it’s ever been. If you think about it from their perspective for a second, you can’t totally blame them. Lately I’ve realized it’s harder than it’s ever been, and these campaigns want to exercise complete and total message discipline. In the current media environment, that’s the whole game. There’s pretty serious tension between running a campaign and running a transparent and open White House. We often complain about this, and rightfully so, but we have to recognize some of the blame here.
What are the odds the Etch A Sketch gaffe would’ve become a thing had Twitter not existed?
… the current user of said account started asking questions about Jews about an hour ago, specifically in the context of Nazi Germany. Ouch, not good for Sweden. (ht @lheron, @buzzfeed)
Earlier Bryson tweet with hashtag ‘#skills’ attempted levity (before facts known) and failed miserably. We took it down and regret the tweetKarl Rove-run Super PAC American Crossroads GPS • Apologizing via tweet for suggesting that Commerce Secretary John Bryson’s weekend hit-and-run accidents might have been the result of drunk driving. Maybe it’s just us, but a Twitter apology seems like, quite literally, the absolute least you could do after realizing you are 100% in the wrong. Um, may want to have a press conference, Karl. source (via • follow)
“Violate Twitter Brand Guidelines”: Take that, overly-aggressive Twitter brand guidelines. (ht Hacker News)
Wrote a thing.
Hat tip to this headline writer.
Congrats Tumblr!
Don’t screw this up Yahoo.
In 2007, I was...
I started tumblr when I was at one of the lowest points of...
Exclusive: How the Syrian Electronic Army hacked the...
We have a ton of things we want to accomplish here and working for some conglomerate or having bean-counting investors breathing down our necks simply isn’t the way for us to achieve them.Taptaptap founder John Casasanta • In a statement released via the Camera+ developer’s blog, announcing that the popular camera replacement app had sold its 8 millionth copy. In a new profile on TheNextWeb, Casasanta revealed that his company has declined acquisition offers from some of the biggest names in tech, including Google, Twitter, Adobe, and Zynga. He says that, since Facebook acquired Instagram, the offers for his company have continued to grow both in size and frequency; however, the development studio simply values its independence too much to turn its direction over to the whim of investors. source (via • follow)
For one thing, Bowman notes that, like a fine five-dollar bottle of artisanal water, the new bird ‘is crafted purely from three sets of overlapping circles,’ a concept which he subsequently expands into some bull about how circles are your friends where ideas are shapes and wings take dream.Gawker’s Caity Weaver • Offering a beautifully cynical take on Twitter’s new bird logo, which many see as an extremely minor change, but others think is graceful. Weaver’s mockery is focused, specifically, on creative director Doug Bowman’s overwrought blog post on the matter, but she also takes a moment to make fun of the company’s strict branding rules, which say you cannot do a bunch of things people are going to continue to do. *golf clap* Good show, Caity.
A model on Twitter live-tweeted about how married actor Brian Presley was trying to picke her up on a plane.
Take this story with a grain of salt: See, her boyfriend Anthony is best buds with this guy named Opie, and she once lied about having a winning lottery ticket.
The company has decided to update its bird again. So, what’s so different about the current logo (right)? It’s made of circles and nothing but. “This bird is crafted purely from three sets of overlapping circles — similar to how your networks, interests and ideas connect and intersect with peers and friends,” the company says. A couple of fun facts about the bird: First, the initial logo was an iStockPhoto they likely spent $6 on initially, and second, the bird’s name is Larry. Yes, after that Larry Bird. Anyway, what do you think about the new logo? Necessary?
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