Anonymous asked:
What is DDOSing? And i guess why is it bad that it's how Twitter is stopping people from using it?
sreegs answered:
‘DOS’ stands for Denial of Service. It’s an attack where a malicious actor uses one machine to repeatedly make requests of an online service in order to tie up its resources and degrade its service.
'DDOS’ means Distributed Denial of Service. It’s the same thing except the attacker uses multiple machines or at least multiple clients, usually distributed across multiple locations, to do the same thing except now it’s harder to shut out the attacker. It’s also usually much higher volume of requests so the scale is bigger.
Basically what happened is Twitter rate limited users from reading too many tweets. However they didn’t change their own client (the website or app) to account for this, so the twitter clients kept getting errors and automatically retrying. They DDOSed themselves because their own client was repeatedly making requests that were being blocked for rate limiting. And whenever the client received a rate limit error they would retry the same request again and again and again. Their own users were doing this without being aware and not at any fault of their own. All they had to do is just go to twitter.
todaysbird
