The Press Loves a Good Social Media Meltdown [VIDEO]

Twitter already gets plenty of press attention, but when it went down yesterday due to a DDoS attack, the news seemed to have unprecedented reach, serving as top story on a number of mainstream news sites for a good part of the day.

Why was this such huge news? The cynical onlooker might say that because old media wants to highlight when things go wrong in new media. However, the more realistic answer is that because of how massive sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even LiveJournal and other impacted services have become, when they go down, it’s a story that impacts tens of millions of people.

Over the past couple days, I’ve been a guest on CNN Live to discuss the issue: yesterday as the story was unraveling, and today as myself and an excellent panel (Kevin Mitnick, Om Malik, and Sarah Milstein) analyzed the aftermath of the attacks. Check out the videos below, and for our full coverage of the social media meltdown, see the resources at the bottom of this post.

Embedded video from CNN Video

Full Coverage of the Social Media DDoS

--Twitter and Facebook DDoS Attacks Targeted One Man

--Is Cyber Warfare to Blame for Twitter Meltdown?

--Denial of Service Attacks Being Investigated by Google, Twitter, Facebook

--Facebook Problems Also the Result of DDoS Attack

--Twitter Outage Explained: What’s a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)?

--Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)

--Facebook Down. Twitter Down. Social Media Meltdown.