FestBuzz

You might have noticed that Twit­ter encoun­tered a slight prob­lem today and was out of action for a few hours. Well, I’d just like to reas­sure the Fes­t­Buzz fol­low­ers that - it wis­nae us!

The prob­lem was a Dis­trib­uted Denial of Ser­vice Attack (DDoS), so the cul­prits were likely some kids with too much time on their hands.

Any­way, while almost every­thing to do with Twit­ter was inac­ces­si­ble, it was still pos­si­ble to read tweets for a while using the Twit­ter Search page. What was inter­est­ing is that it was still pos­si­ble to post tweets by send­ing them in as text mes­sages.

So if inter­na­tional cyber-warware erupts again dur­ing the Fes­ti­val, fear not! You can still send your review tweets in by text mes­sage and we’ll pick them up once a cease-fire is declared! Just go to the devices page in Twit­ter and reg­is­ter your phone num­ber. You’ll then have to send a unique code once to ver­ify your phone num­ber. After that you can send tweets to your account by send­ing a text. Just be sure to store Twitter’s phone num­ber in your phone.

In other news we’ve started pick­ing up lots of show review tweets! We’re just tight­en­ing a few nuts and blots here and there on our unique sen­ti­ment analy­sis engine, but we’ll be ready to start giv­ing you the word on the tweet soon. Watch this space!

/edit OK, ummm, so I decided to wipe my mobile phone num­ber from Twit­ter and set it up again, just to make sure it was as easy as I remem­bered. But it seems like Twit­ter text *is* bro­ken now! They’re still recov­er­ing from the DDoS attack. I sus­pect any mes­sages sent will get through even­tu­ally, but it *was* work­ing ear­lier when all else was fail­ing. Ho-hum, such is the Internet.