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Adam Ostrow of the social media site mashable.com wondered what people did during the Twitter outage yesterday.
- “I rocked in the corner by myself, slowly slipping into madness.”
- “I returned six months of phone calls, gave blood, pulled weeds, mastered knee-hooping, kicked all my computers at least once, and took pictures of my butt.”
- “I spent time with my kids. Kinda nice actually.”
- “I went to the Great British Beer Festival (@gbff #gbff). Got slightly drunk and missed out on the Fullers’ Vintage Ale because they were announcing it going on sale using Twitter.”
- “Found girlfriend, got marr[i]ed, started my own business, divorced, traveled around the world and ate pie.”
- “Read…gasp…mainstream media to find out what was going on.”
- “Good grief. Where’s the ‘I Survived Twitter’s Downtime’ T-shirts?”
It has since been reported that the attack, which also affected Facebook and Google, was directed at a single individual – a blogger from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
The blogger, who uses the account name “Cyxymu,” (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.
“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” Kelly said. “We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks, and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them, if we can.”
Cyxymu himself, via his Twitter account, which as of a few hours ago was finally accessible again, had no doubt who was behind the attack: “My twitter is online! Thank you all for support after ciber attack from Russia!“