Friday, August 7, 2009

Twitter, Facebook, Xbox Live Down - What's next

The recent outages that Twitter, Facebook and now Xbox Live have experienced are apparently from a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. This type of attack is difficult to defend against since it is inherent in the way that computers communicate. Actually it is quite amazing that the TCP/IP protocol has worked well for over 30 years. Can you think of any technology that has lasted that long before being obsolete? I have not researched if IPv6 will provide some sort of protection for a massive flood of data that can cause these types of global outages. The fact is that everyone on the web is susceptible to an organized DoS attack and while there might be some remediation actions that can be used to restore service, the protocol will need to be redesigned to react differently to this type of attack.