Twitter came under a ‘Denial of Service’ attack today less than 24 hours after I bemoaned the proliferation of spam on the micro blogging social network. The site was down for well over an hour as the result of a probable malicious targeted assault on the company’s US based servers. It isn’t yet clear where the attack came from.
From launch up until a few months ago twitter went down on a fairly frequent basis and the so called ‘fail-whale’ screen was a familiar site to early users who would wait anything from a few seconds to in some cases a few hours to get back on stream. Since then twitter has gone mainstream,user levels have accelerated and it is gaining ground as a bona fide marketing and PR platform, amongst many other valuable uses.
Whilst there is still no agreed model for monetising the site’s success it’s future value will be hugely affected by its ability to keep itself up and running.
PR and the Social Web 
These things are connected though, aren’t they? A robust Twitter will eat cash, especially as an open API will always be difficult to defend.
Agree (although I suspect your technical understanding is superior to mine). The DDOS attack is a result of perceptions of twitters value but to maximise value they will need more servers more widely distributed to protect from future attacks and that’s expensive.