Twitter Outrage ~(-_-)~
Twitter Outrage! Why Does It Matter?
On August 6, 2009, the popular social networking website, Twitter was down for two hours. For those of you who are not familiar with the social networking website, Twitter is “a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices” (twitter.com/about, 2009). Twitter allows users to send a maximum of 140-character message (which is the allowable number of characters for a text message) called tweets to their followers who subscribe to receive updates from other users.
Last Thursday, August 6, 2009, Twitter and other popular social networking sites experienced a Denial-of-Service attack that left many users handicapped because they were unable to access their accounts. A Wall Street Journal article reported series of incidences and cases of disturbances that sprang from the inability of users to update their followers on their current status. The article even called the Twitter outrage “the unimaginable: life without Twitter” (Vascellaro, J. & Steel, E., 2009). The article reported cases such as a celebrity who was unable to update his 1.2 million followers of his whereabouts and how users around the globe were denied their freedom to broadcast their deepest thought for two full hours (Vascellaro, J. & Steel, E., 2009).