Twitter's PR relatively unscathed as attention of outage story focuses on identity of hackers

I’m still a little surprised that Twitter’s outage made the front page of the FT today. Was it a PR disaster for the media world’s favourite social networking site? I think they might just about have got away with it.

You would have been forgiven for thinking that the DOS attack (and if you want to know what one of them is read the piece on CNET) only affected Twitter, but Facebook, Livejournal and Blogger were also caught up in the attack. But the media loves to write about Twitter, so it was the focus of many of the pieces.

Twitter’s PR seems to resemble an invisible forcefield, because most of the pieces I’ve read don’t seem to have affected its reputation (and it’s hardly been the most reliable of services in the last year). Instead, the media and blogosphere seems more interested in speculating who was behind the attacks, with theories ranging from a 15 year old in a bedroom to the Russians, while a piece on Mashable claims that it was the result of the Georgia-Russia troubles.

Which, in a week when Ofcom research claimed that social networking is losing its cool, is all rather convenient for Twitter, Facebook and co.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Twitter Offline Due To DDoS (tech.slashdot.org)
• Twitter Recovering From Denial of Service Attack. Facebook, FriendFeed and LiveJournal Also Report Problems. (themoderatevoice.com)
• Twitter and Facebook DDoS Attacks Targeted One Man (mashable.com)
• Bits: Twitter Overwhelmed by Web Attack (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Facebook confirms DoS attack same day as Twitter (macworld.com)

Tagged as: Denial-of-service attack, DOS, facebook, twitter