'Tango down': hackers claim responsibility for Twitter outage

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'Tango down': hackers claim responsibility for Twitter outage

A hacker group has claimed credit for outages at Twitter after the company said it was affected by a "cascaded bug" which hit the wildly popular website.

"We just #TangoDown'd http://twitter.com for 40 minutes worldwide!" said a tweet on Thursday from the group called UGNazi, which has been linked to attacks on US government websites.

Twitter says most of the hacked accounts are duplicates or bogus.

Twitter says most of the hacked accounts are duplicates or bogus.

The term "tango down" is used in the hacker community to refer to a so-called denial of service attack which can shut down a website.

The company first acknowledged "issues accessing Twitter," and said its "engineers are currently working to resolve the issue."

Around an hour later, Twitter said: "The issue has been resolved and all services are currently operational."

But after the problems resurfaced, Twitter said: "Today's outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components."

It followed up by saying, "A cascaded bug has an effect that isn't confined to a particular software element; its effect 'cascades' into other elements as well."

The company made no mention of an attack, and the reference to a "cascaded bug" left some experts confused.

A cascaded bug "probably means a glitch that caused one server to fail in an odd way, or send an odd message, that caused a neighboring server to fail, ad nauseum," said Michael Hicks, director of the University of Maryland Cybersecurity Center.

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"Very quickly, a bunch of systems are down."

Hicks said the claim of a "denial of service" or DOS attack "usually consists of a computer, or many computers, sending tons of traffic at a service. But it could also be due to smartly chosen traffic that cases a bug to manifest that results in the bad behavior we saw, bringing down parts of the system."

Johannes Ullrich of the SANS Technology Institute's Internet Storm Center said a cascaded bug could be something akin to an electric failure, where "one power line shutting down can cause another line to overload that now has to carry extra load."

The on-again-off-again access led to a barrage of comments and tweets about the problem, underscoring the growing importance of the messaging service.

"Twitters broke, my life has no meaning anymore," one user wrote on the social media website Tumblr.

Another wrote, "OMG TWITTER BROKE. I feel so alone right now."

Some tweeted their comments when the site was accessible.

"My boss shut down Twitter because he wanted me to get back to work. Feel free to kill him if you want," one tweet said.

Another said: "Twitter went down, I looked up & was like, who are these people in my house? Turns out I have a wife & a daughter."

And still another tweeted: "Unlike my ex-wife, Twitter came crawling back."

On Facebook, a member wrote: "Be honest. Did you spend most of Twitter being down desperately trying to tweet about Twitter being down?"

When word of the bug surfaced, one Twitter member said, "Oh great. Now I have to ask my exterminator whether he has a poison for 'cascaded bugs.'"

Twitter, which allows its members to post brief comments, links or pictures, claims to have more than 140 million active users, with the largest number being in the United States.

A recent survey found one in seven Americans who go online use Twitter and eight percent do so every day.

AFP

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