That’s right, Twitter went down today due to DDoS attacks. Old news. I’m writing, however, about how people responded to this bit of fail.
A few hours of Twitter outage, and apparently, people had stompy fits, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the last blackberry outage. See, there were rumors out there, that there existed these hives of Starbucks-dwelling hermits who spent all of their time huddled around laptops and netbooks or incessantly fondling the touchscreens of their cell phones, and their only interaction with the outside world happens to be Twitter. And if ever it were to go down… OH NO! they just wouldn’t survive the day and would be incapable of coping with the real world again.
Just rumors, I thought. Total exaggeration. No one would be that stupid, that facetious, that fad-obsessed, that an actual social life would be nonexistent in the face of the almighty Twitter.
Apparently, and as a testament to the truly sad state this humanity has degenerated to, I was so wrong:
For Twitter users, the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down.
“I had to Google search Twitter to find out what was going on, when normally my Twitter feed gives me all the breaking news I need,” said Alison Koski, a New York public-relations manager. She added she felt “completely lost” without Twitter.
Oh heavens, she had to actually Google something to find out about something? The utter indignity! How did she survive such a harrowing ordeal! I mean to think for a few hours, she had to look away from her cell phone to find out what’s going on in the world! WHAT HORROR!
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