SO GIBSON IT HURTS. - August 6th, 2009

Early this morning, Twitter dropped off the face of the Internet for a couple of hours. When I noticed the distinct lack of chatter I went to see if anyone was still awake on Facebook. That wasn’t loading either. I started wondering if maybe both had gone down simultaneously, since I still had data streaming to let me know the problem wasn’t on my end. Facebook came back immediately and I chalked it up to network hiccups taking place at the same time as Twitter going under.

Soon afterwards, as Twitter attempted to blip back into existence, they posted an update on their status blog explaining that they were in fact under a DDoS attack, source unknown. Nearly every major Internet-equipped news service in the world began to post updates about Twitter’s demise. This irked me, since these people didn’t seem to realize they were basically reporting something about as new as velcro shoes, but it was interesting nonetheless if for nothing but the fact that Twitter has become what it has.

A Gibson Moment

So this afternoon I wake up to the news, as reported cnet’s Insecurity Complex that Twitter was not the only company affected by the attack. That in fact, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Livejournal had been targeted in a seemingly massive effort to blockade a single blogger. The pro-georgian blogger uses the handle “Cyxymu” – the name of a town in Georgia (likely his own) – has accounts at all affected sites, and it was these accounts that the attacks were supposedly targeting.

While the source(s) of this combined attack are as yet unknown, the combined might of all these tech companies working in tandem would probably stand a better chance of discovering it than most governments. Google remained largely unaffected during the outage, but tends to take this sort of thing very seriously. Unlike smaller startups Facebook and Twitter, Google has the financial clout to get results.

While nobody wants to say it outright, the fingers are pointing in one general direction for the source of the attack, and the general consensus is that It’s probably Russian.

UPDATE: The Guardian reports that Cyxymu “said his real name was Georgy and that he was a 34-year-old economics lecturer. He is an active critic of Moscow’s politics in the Caucasus region and was the victim of a similar attack last year that crashed LiveJournal.” They also report that he’s expressed a firm belief that the Kremlin is behind the attacks.

That’s when it hit me. What has likely just happened, is that several cutting-edge technology firms with vested interests in global Internet use have just suffered through collateral damage in a totally foreign, Russian conflict. Naturally, the first thing that came to mind was William Gibson, and his weirdly prescient writings over the last 20 or so years. Cyberwars, Russia, fractured Internets.

How freaking Gibson is that? Is “Gibson” even an adjective? I’m going to treat it like one from now on.

image via goodreads