Twitter Crash: Hack Or Hardware Fail?

Twitter blames a cascading bug, but hacking group UGNazi claims responsibility.

Twitter was unavailable for about two hours Thursday due to a bug or to a denial of service attack.
Twitter claims the problem was equipment-related. Todays outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components, a company spokesman said in an email, denying the involvement of hackers.
The hacking group UGNazi, however, claimed via Twitter to have been responsible
for taking down Twitter
.
In a separate email sent to
InformationWeek
, a person claiming to be Cosmo, one of the individuals associated with UGNazi, reiterated that claim. Hello, I am Cosmo from UGNazi and I would like to inform you we just took twitter.com down with a DDoS Attack. It has been down for 20 minutes now, the email said.
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The person claiming to be Cosmo disputed Twitters denial in a follow-up email. Twitter moved to multiple servers today to try and migrate [sic] the attack, the sender said. It was not a bug.
Thursday afternoon, Twitter posted more information about the outage.
At approximately 9:00am PDT, we discovered that Twitter was inaccessible for all Web users, and mobile clients were not showing new Tweets, Mazen Rawashdeh, Twitters VP of engineering, said in
a blog post
. We immediately began to investigate the issue and found that there was a cascading bug in one of our infrastructure components. This wasnt due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today.
Yet asked directly whether UGNazis claims were inaccurate, a Twitter spokeswoman replied, We dont have a comment on that.
So could those speaking for UGNazi be telling the truth? Possibly. A DDoS attack, after all, isnt technically a hack. No vulnerabilities or exploits affecting Twitters systems are involved in sending a flood of data to overwhelm Twitters servers. Pressed for further clarification, Twitter did not immediately respond.
Cosmo, identified as Hannah Sweet on the UGNazi website, was arrested by the FBI in May. The FBI did not immediately respond to a query submitted to its national press office about whether Cosmo could have been involved in the supposed attack on Twitter.
The person claiming to be Cosmo confirmed being arrested by the FBI but, in an email, declined to discuss the matter.
Cosmos arrest was reportedly related to UGNazis alleged involvement in the
breach of billing company WHMCS
in May. UGNazi also claimed responsibility for
hacking a Web service called CloudFlare
earlier this month in order to conduct an attack on 4Chan.
Though Twitter was accessible Thursday evening, the companys status blog indicated
ongoing issues
five hours after the initial problem was reported. Twitter has reported far
fewer site reliability issues in 2012
than in previous years.
According to Rawashdeh, Twitter has enjoyed its highest reliability to date over the past six months.
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