July 27th, 2021

Twitter misdetected the 2011 Build conference keynote as a denial-of-service attack

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

During the 2011 Microsoft Build conference keynote, the volume of messages was so high that Twitter went down.

Well, it went down in the convention center.

There was some frantic network troubleshooting going on to identify why nobody could access Twitter via the convention center wireless network. Eventually, somebody called Twitter technical support¹ to get some help with the problem, and they learned that Twitter blocked all traffic from the convention center because it looked like a denial-of-service attack.

“Nope, we just have a lot of excited developers.”

They got the ban lifted, and Twitter access came back for the remainder of the keynote.

I recall that some attendees complained that the wireless access during the keynote was terrible, though they didn’t name Twitter specifically. Well, now you know why. And it was partly your fault.

Bonus chatter: I assume that nowadays, Twitter keeps track of major events and knows to expect, say, a lot of activity at major music concerts, conventions, and sporting events.

¹ I had no idea that Twitter even had a technical support phone number.

Category
Old New Thing
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History

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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  • Runliang Liu (WICRESOFT NORTH AMERICA LTD)Microsoft employee

    I installed Windows 8 Costumer Preview on a all in one pc with touchscreen when I was 12. That’s my earliest memory about prerelease version of Windows…

  • M. W.

    * Twitter had a technical-support phone-number. Like apparently every company these days (*cough*YouTube*cough* ¬_¬), their official customer-support department is now, well, Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Facebook). 😒 But can you blame them when the White House’s Press Room was Twitter for four years? 🤦

  • Daniel Findley

    Can you imagine the support tech’s reaction?

    MS: “Hi, this is Taylor from Microsoft”
    TW: “… yeah right!”

    • M. W.

      Tech-support scammers weren’t really a thing yet in 2011, so people wouldn’t have been so skeptical at the time. 🤷

  • pivotman319

    Is part of the outage attributed to the reveal of Microsoft’s then-upcoming Windows 8?

  • Nick Allmaker

    Ah, 2011. The halcyon days of people being excited about Windows 8

    • Brian Boorman

      Ah, 2011. Couldn’t they just SMS shortcode their Tweet back then?

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