Both Twitter and Facebook are facing Denial of Service (or Dos) attacks today. Twitter ended up going completely down, Facebook was able to weather the storm, although it was still a bit pokey at times. What is funny about this is how all the pundits say “their growth caused them to fail to anticipate this kind of problem.”

The truth is the exact opposite. Facebook and Twitter probably get millions of hits per an hour. The sheer amount of traffic they already get would be a Denial of Service attack for many other sites. Even at the height of Twitter activities such as the Iran Election Protests Twitter did pretty good. So to make it a true DoS, the number of hacked computers has to be pretty extensive.

With the coordination of hitting both sites I would not be surprised at all if this attack turned out to be Chinese hackers testing out new methods before taking on US Government Servers. I also would not be surprised if it wasn’t Russian Mafia types trying to blackmail the two companies.

Even worse, I would not be surprised to find out that this was some 15 year old kid taking revenge on the two services for some hormone induced perceived slight against himself.