Anonymous Blamed for Twitter Shutdown, Hackers Deny

After on January 19 they released a video statement to reveal their intentions of going after some major websites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, United Nations and Capital One Bank if Megaupload were not “reinstated to the Internet,” when Twitter went offline a few hours ago, everyone thought that Anonymous must be behind the shutdown.

Sociable reported that a large number of requests, which represented a potential DDoS attack, were made during the time when Twitter was down.

Anonymous representatives immediately came forward with a statement to deny that they had anything to do with the social media website’s temporary closure.

“MAYBE real users flooded Twitter with tweets about the AFC/NFC games at the times it went down? Game results correspond to Twitter downtime,” the hackers tweeted.

“That is a prime example of why you have to think about what you read in the media and question how/why it is presented to you.”

Twitter representatives stated that the site was experiencing issues, but failed to provide details.

“Update: This issue has been resolved. Some users may currently be experiencing site issues; our engineers are working on resolving this issue,” said the social media site’s status blog.

Judging by the other websites that comprise the list of victims made in Operation Megaupload, it may have seemed plausible that the hacktivist collective managed to take down Twitter. On the other hand, a website that usually records a lot of traffic is probably not as easy to take down as others.

Operation Megaupload, considered one of the largest and most successful operations initiated by Anonymous, is still ongoing, a lot of websites still being DDoSed and defaced by hackers.

In Brazil, hackers defaced a lot of websites in support of the operation and many of the sites that have anything to do with SOPA or piracy are still having a hard time recovering.