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

Raymond Chen

July 27th, 20217 0

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.

Raymond Chen