For many, the world is was in disarray. It seems that the Twitters have been hacked (read: defaced) by the infamous (never heard of them though) Iranian Cyber Army.
Twitter rerouted to an Iranian Cyber Army page.
The full (translated) text on the 'hacked' page is:
Iranian Cyber Army
THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM
U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don't, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….
NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST ;)
Take Care.
Hacked is a strong word, since it looks like a DNS reroute (no actual Twitter servers were injured during this incident).
When accessing Twitter through https, you get a warning that the certificate is untrusted. Further investigation shows that the actual certificated is issued for a Bluehost.com server.
SSL Error Explained in FireFox
SSL Certificate for Bluehost.com So basically, traffic is rerouted to another host on the Internet. This can be done through the manipulation of the domain name service records. Assign a different IP address to twitter.com, or assign a canonical name / CNAME, and your done.
The result is mostly the same; you end up somewhere else.
I guess that the twitter servers are purring like little kittens at this moment since they are receiving little to no traffic at this time.
Instant update while writing this post: the twitters are back at Friday December 18th @ 08:02 CET. There's a 'gap' in my timeline from little over an hour, so it didn't take them that long to fix it.