Twitter Hacker Attack Impacts Public Safety Notification

The hacker attack on Twitter yesterday (August 5, 2009) should cause concerns for public safety and public sector officials attempting to use the service for emergency notification purposes. Twitter was compromised causing "denial of service" errors that brought the site to a complete halt. A great govtech.com article yesterday by Matt Williams provides good insight into the issue.

We can confirm a growing trend of public safety people interested in pushing notifications through services such as Twitter. This is particularly true of campus-oriented alerts.

The incident yesterday points to a clear problem with relying on these types of commercial services for critical notifications. These services were never designed to carry high-priority information, and no up-time guarantees are made.

The same is true for SMS (text-messaging) notifications. SMS-based notification services are not all created equal as we've learned from several high-profile school emergency situations where the SMS alerting worked inadequately (more on this to come).

While there is certainly nothing wrong with utilizing social networks as a component of overall notification strategy, relying solely on these is likely to be a big mistake as the outage yesterday illustrates.


-LBB

For other news on Twitter and notification, check out this blog post.