Just before Twitter went down again yesterday, many Twitter users noticed a fleeting click tracker in the address bar of the browser before it redirected them to the final site — which might be the cause of downtime as too many people clicked on the redirects. Redirects that look like that http://twitter.com/link_click_count…
When it came back again, the fleeting click tracker was gone so maybe this was just a preview test of what Twitter intends to do in the future.
Apparently Twitter looks determined to track all the links a user clicks on the site, but this is not something utterly new as they already do it in an unorganized way. Currently a user gets redirected twice, first by the shortened URL and then by Twitter itself. Maybe Twitter wants to know where it is sending the most amount of traffic, who is sending the most traffic and which are the most popular tweets.
The entire data can be useful for Twitter’s planned analytics service intended for business customers.
[via TechCrunch] Original image by theelusivefish
Yesterday was probably a day were you had to unwillingly keep away from your favorite social networking site, Twitter. Hell you were being restricted in opening your Facebook or your Livejournal account … Getting back to Twitter, the glitch was a courtesy of a denial-of service attack but thankfully the service is now back-on-track. The recovery though hasn’t been fully made as there is still degraded service for some people.
The ddos has been defined as a single massive coordinated attack and Twitter has been working closely with other companies and services affected to recover completely. As a motivation behind this event, Twitter prefers not to speculate. The good news however, is that no user data was compromised in this attack and that is as far as we should be bothered.
Just to clear out things — it is an activity about saturating a service with so many requests that it cannot respond to legitimate requests thus succeeding in denying service to the intended customers. This attack has made Twitter realize that there is still a lot of work to be done to safeguard the site against such attacks and the company fully acknowledges the fact.
So we can’t help but wonder if Twitter isn’t too big for the infrastructure they’re using at the moment. It’s somehow unacceptable for a site at this size to go down on a ddos attack! We hope for the better!
