Was the Twitter outage really related to the DDoS attack on WikiLeaks? Microblogging site says no

Twitter users across some parts of the globe, including the US and Japan, experienced a brief outage on Monday (7 November). The social media network was down for a mere half an hour, however, the outage came on the heels of WikiLeaks reportedly suffering a "targeted" DDoS attack. Twitter has since reportedly confirmed that the outage was unrelated to the alleged cyberattack on WikiLeaks.

The whistle-blowing platform said it came under attack shortly after publishing nearly 8,000 new emails from the DNC (Democratic National Committee). According to reports, WikiLeaks said in a post on Facebook, "We are still under 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."

Twitter infrastructure and operations engineer Mazdak Hashemi later said in a tweet, "The recent Twitter interruption was due to a network routing misconfiguration during internal testing. We apologise for the inconvenience." A Twitter spokesperson told the DailyDot that the outage was unrelated to the alleged attack on WikiLeaks.

Reports of the Twitter outage peaked to nearly 14,000, according to Downdetector.com, indicating that many users in Japan were still experiencing issues that lasted several hours, the Independent reported.

However, the outage became fodder for various conspiracy theories among users, many of whom blamed the social media site's downtime on WikiLeaks' alleged DDoS attack.