Editors note: The following is a firsthand look at how TweetPhoto, a photo-sharing startup based in Southern California, handled the effects on it of the sustained mid-August DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on Twitter. The lesson: Keep customers informed.

It’s been a wild road the last 10 days for both Twitter, TweetPhoto and many other apps developed around the Twitter API.

It began with the DDoS attacks about two weeks ago. The site experienced degraded performance as the site was being infiltrated by bogus requests causing all sorts of problems.

One of the main problems was the API. The attacks were coming from Twitter API requests causing tremendous bottlenecks. It got so bad that the Twitter API team was thrown into fire fighting mode – trying to get the blaze under control and keep it dormant until they could figure out the cause and a proper solution.

Well, like most fires . . .  it takes lots of resources and can go on for weeks.

In the case of these attacks it looks like things are getting back to normal. There was a block of three days beginning this past Friday that no one could log into TweetPhoto and their other favorite Twitter apps – well, at least the ones that were blocked by Twitter while trying to contain the fire.

During the first wave of attacks we added an alert to the top of TweetPhoto to help manage expectations as there really isn’t much we could do, everything was in the hands of Twitter.

Did this notification process help you?

Please note that if there are any other blazes or issues with the site you’ll be able to be notified by following TweetPhoto on Twitter or checking the Important Notice message on the site.

Eventually we’ll build a TweetPhoto Status page to monitor site performance. If you ever have any questions about this or anything else please let us know.

This blog post by Sean Callahan, originally was published Aug. 18, 2009, on TweetPhoto.com.

• customers
• DDOS
• social media
• TweetPhoto
• twitter