Did the Kremlin Kill Twitter?

Yesterday, as blood poured down from the heavens, the seas boiled and the Earth was ripped apart because of the Denial of Service attack against Google, Twitter and Facebook (“OMG, I can’t tweet about the fact that Twitter is down!) we pondered one alluring possibility: is Russia involved?

Maybe. We do know that the disruption of all social networking on the planet was directed at one person:

BBC: "The massively co-ordinated attack on websites including Google, Facebook and Twitter was directed at one individual, a pro-Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu… Specifically, the person is an activist blogger and a botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users."

Keep in mind, this was on the one year anniversary of the Russia-Georgia war, and Kremlin IP addresses have been used to launch DoS attacks against Estonia (and others) in the past.

"Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I'm certain the order came from the Russian government," Cyxymu said.

The good news, is that Google was able to repel the attack. The bad news, is that the Russia-Georgia cyber war prevented me from making a Facebook update.

The horror!

[Update: If you're interested, PC World has a tech-ish wrap-up of the attack.]