Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal were all victims of Distributed Denial of Service attacks today that crippled each of their services for several hours, reports Mashable. One of my client’s fan page went missing late afternoon CET and it only just came back online at approx 22:00 CET.
In the meantime, we lost traffic and several people got in touch wondering if the page had been intentionally deleted.
Naturally, the whole incident caused a fair amount of stress and needless hassle. But beyond that I think today’s attacks reveal just how increasingly reliant we’re becoming on social media sites.
When Twitter went down people were complaining, connections were lost and business slowed. Although it was a bit of an inconvenience, in real terms the loss of my client’s Facebook fan page will have meant a sizeable reduction in today’s web traffic. Yes, it’s become that important!
Of course there will always be server problems, hackers, and online frustration. But it’s clear to me from the responses I received from other webmasters and online marketers that we’re used to our social media sites being there 24/7 now. And we don’t like it when they go away!
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