Is Twitter less resilient than we think?

What should we make of Twitter’s recent infalliability to DDOS attacks, which made it inaccessible for several hours? One conclusion that I’ve drawn is that Twitter is less robust that we think. While I was desperately trying to reach the unresponsive web-site, I kept asking myself if certain experts (I am looking at your quote in the New York Times, Jonathan Zittrain!) have previously overstated the case for its robustness and resilience.

The argument about Twitter’s robustness goes something like this: Twitter the company is so lazy and unprofessional that a bunch of other smaller start-ups stepped in and developed cool nifty applications – like TweetDeck or Twirl-  that make it possible to read and post to Twitter without visiting the site itself (yes, these days corporate incompetence is usually wrapped in the enthusiastic rhetoric of "open APIs" that allow "anyone" – you hear me? ANYONE! – develop additional applications for the platform).

Thus, with all those TweetDecks and Twirls, who needs Twitter.com? Applied to Iran, this means that Twitter might lie beyond the reach of current censorship tools, for little will be achieved merely by blocking its URL (frankly, I am not 100% sure that this is accurate – don’t all those remote clients have to communicate back to Twitter’s APIs anyway? But let’s suppose for a moment that it’s true). So, as we may have finally achieved an "unblockable" communications platform, we could sit back and wait until the Twitter revolutionaries set the houses of their despotic leaders on fire.

All of this looks good in theory. However, in practice, all the talk about robusness could be stopped by a series of DDOS attacks against Twitter itself. Suddently, all those nifty applications become completely useless. So no matter how robust and resilient (and may I add "inane"?) Twitter is, it’s still as vulnerable as other sites (plus, it’s inane and half-baked nature may only hurt here – you don’t want their maintenance to take forever).

Sure, some may counter: but so what, most DDOS attacks get fixed in a few hours… True, but that’s also how exactly long most windows of opportunities for protest-based democratic change in authoritarian states last for. Twitter is most useful after specific (and well-timed) geopolitical events, like elections, where it could help propel a given political force to much larger audiences, particularly in the West. However, the more time passes after the elections, the less successful any ensuing protests would be. Thus, all incumbents need to do is to make sure that Twitter, Facebook, etc are unavaible for a few hours after the elections have been announced – and this is where DDOS attacks could be really useful.

What does it all mean? Most likely, it means that we are poised to see more and more governments experimenting with cyberwarfare as a potentially viable alternative to censorship. First, it could be cheap compared to, say, trying to block individual Twitter or YouTube pages. Second, it’s perfectly deniable – there are no court orders, and we still don’t know how to track the consequences of DDOS attacks to those who ordered them. Third, as compared to censorships, cyber-attacks work (and succeed) on a GLOBAL not just local level: if you want to stop any discussions of Twitter revolutions, you may as well opt to do it across the entire service, rather than just confine it to your geographic zone (which means that diaspora’s immediate impact on events would be minimized too…)

This is, of course, just a theory – and we don’t really know for sure who was behind Thursday’s DDOS-attacks on Twitter anyway – but all of this seems so logical and rational to me that I can’t think of a reason why authoritarian govenrments WON"T be doing this…