App developers stung by Twitter's DOS woes

08.08.2009

Facebook and LiveJournal also got hit on Thursday. According to news reports and information from companies affected, the attacks appear directed at silencing a blogger in the country of Georgia who has been critical of Russia's actions and policies toward that neighboring country.

Hayes Davis, founder of , saw his company's Twitter applications impacted, including its social search engine for shopping deals and promotions, .

However, he feels Twitter has handled the situation as well as can be expected for a young, small company. "They did a good job of communicating with the developers," he said in a phone interview. "I have a lot of sympathy for Twitter. It's a big target right now, and a denial-of-service attack is really hard to defend against. I don't begrudge Twitter the downtime by any means."

TweetLater's Pretorius trusts in Twitter engineers' ability to solve the problem. "Twitter's approach of overcompensating in the defense and then selectively restoring legitimate access is probably the same approach that I would have taken under the same circumstances. I have full faith in their engineers that full access will be restored as soon as they can safely do so," he said.