Was Google attacked?

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Ankit Fadia

Imagine something as useful as a toothbrush missing, or stolen or destroyed! That’s how it was when GTalk was down for over three hours and it wasn’t an ordinary incident.

Boyfriends couldn’t ping their darlings, bosses weren’t yelling (that’s good right?) and status-message addicts were ripping their hair off.
While Google was quick to release a statement on the problem, neither was the reason for the outage provided, nor were they able to rectify it immediately, at least not until after about five hours since the problems started.
Once services were restored, they posted a message on the App Status Dashboard that read, “The problem with Google Talk should be resolved. We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.”
Speaking about the outage, says leading independent computer security consultant Ankit Fadia, “I believe the issue might have been caused due to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, where in the servers are fed with unlimited amount of data leading to overload and also causing traffic by occupying all the available bandwidth.”
While Ankit suspects that the problem mostly would’ve been DoS attack, he says that if that really is the case, he would be very taken aback. “I would be very surprised if it is a DoS attack because Google usually has very good security measures and is rarely in the news for being the target.
“But of course, this outage is a one-off case and by no means will it indicate any sort of fall in popularity in one of the simplest of chat interfaces,” Ankit adds.
But that wasn’t the end of Internet users’ woes. Minutes after Gtalk services were restored, Twitter started acting up, with users unable to access and post tweets. This is the second time in five weeks that the popular social networking website has suffered an outage.
And with the upcoming Olympics and expected increase in usage, one can only hope these service providers pull up their socks and running shoes. And fast!