For those of you who tweet and broadcast every trivial detail of your otherwise boring lives, I’m sure you were baffled as to why you had trouble logging in to your Twitter and Facebook accounts yesterday morning. The two communication giants experienced severe technical problems after undergoing a denial-of-service attack. Because of this, the popular website Facebook suffered from very slow to non-functioning features whereas its crackishly addictive counterpart Twitter was completely inaccessible for several hours. Thousands of folks were found frantically running through the streets overcome with confusion, sadness and anger because they experienced such a great loss in the community (just kidding, but it wouldn’t have been a total surprise to see that).

Although details are still sketchy as to the exact source of the attack, Yahoo News states that it might have been one of the effects of the political divergence between countries Russia and Georgia. Yesterday’s incident sent links and messages from a Georgian activist to thousands of people who, upon following the pages, caused an overwhelming chain of events that possibly led to the websites’ shut down.

Denial-of-service attacks usually arise from ‘botnets’- a very large group of computers affected by a virus used to compromise a website’s server by sending out numerous communication requests at the same time (It’s the same approach in which spam is sent and passwords are stolen). The websites receive so many requests from so many different IP addresses, they cannot distinguish the good communication from the bad and either experience hosts of technical issues or shut down completely. Case and point: the Twitter/Facebook catastrophe that went down yesterday.

It’s not the first time something like this has happened. Back in the days before Twitter and Facebook existed (and folks did more meaningful stuff with their lives besides letting the entire world know every time they sneezed) websites like CNN and Amazon were affected by attacks similar to this one. Earlier this week, Gawker Media, another blogging network, was also hacked as well.

However, don’t get too upset- the technical geniuses of the world have fixed the problem and both sites are up and running again. Of course, this event poses the ever-rhetorical question: Is the info I’ve posted online safe? According to Facebook, it is. The company posted a statement yesterday on the website saying that “no user data was at risk and the matter is now resolved for the majority of users”. So no need to be alarmed- your drunken photos and other facets of self-debauchery are completely safe from being distributed at random. For now, at least.