A network configuration error led to Twitter’s outage early Monday morning, according to Mazdak Hashemi, the network’s infrastructure and uptime engineer.
The recent Twitter interruption was due to a network routing misconfiguration during internal testing. We apologize for the inconvenience.
— mazdak hashemi (@mazdakh) November 7, 2016
While lasting only half an hour and subsiding in the small hours of morning, the technical issue at Twitter immediately became fodder for conspiracy theorists who blamed the downtime on a denial-of-service attack purportedly intended to silence WikiLeaks, which said its website was under attack shortly after publishing another batch of Democratic National Committee emails.
“We are still under a DoS attack on our email publication servers and it appears that Twitter is down as well, we are unable to confirm if this is an attack on twitter at this time,” WikiLeaks said in a statement, while requesting donations to “increase capacity.”
That moment when you Realize they are DDOS'ing @WIkiLeaks @Twitter and @4Chan to cover up a Horrific Crime. RIP Madeleine McCann. pic.twitter.com/4EqSAcOpWA
— meme (@refutal) November 7, 2016
Holy #DNCLeaks2, NSA just shut twitter down and wiki leaks is now under DDos Attack #DNCLeak2
— Baird Carver (@matt768) November 7, 2016
https://twitter.com/yokalli/status/795511990819110913
A source at Twitter confirmed to the Daily Dot by direct message that the network’s downtime was unrelated to the alleged attack on WikiLeaks.