Okay, it’s August. News is slow, but the media went hog-wild reporting this morning’s Twitter takedown by hackers. The event got moon shot coverage?
The Wall Street Journal has just issued its third update on the “denial of service” situation, which rendered the Twitter site useless to its devotees. [Full disclosure: I tweet.] Seeking to head off a global panic, the WSJ assured tender online readers the cyber-attack on Twitter used a “relatively unsophisticated technique.” That unlucky admission quickly sent Twitter’s IPO team back to the drawing board.
CNET throws out the provocative question: “Could You Be Responsible for the Twitter Outage.” Shame on you! The San Francisco Chronicle suggests the Twitter attack is a “national security issue,” which is more than what the Chron said about those Russian subs off the east coast that are testing our new President. The New York Times second Twitter update waxes a tad poetic. “The extended silence in a normally noisy Twitterworld began around 9 a.m.” reports Riva Richmond. And so it goes.
There’s a big sigh of media relief. America can rest somewhat assured because Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is on the case. Biz blogged “on this otherwise happy Thursday morning (??), Twitter faced the same attack and “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.” Note to Biz: methinks a “denial of service” attack on sites run by Citibank, BankAmerica, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo would pose more of a threat to the commonwealth than a temporary disruption to a 140-character microblogging site.
Twitter tumult distracted the media from the hard news of the day, such as the search for Barack Obama’s birth certificate and the latest right-wing mob attacks on Democratic town tall meetings.
Slow news day, indeed. Did you hear about the troubles at Facebook?
