Twitter’s down and Facebook is slow, not just for Sri Lanka

ICTs in general 1 Minute

One never knows when a site doesn’t load in Sri Lanka whether the good folk at SLT have blocked it to protect our morals. Fearing the worst when Facebook was sluggish and Twitter refused to load, went to Google and found two sites that are quite handy.

The first, Is Twitter Down?, is a site dedicated to a yes / no response to the obvious question.

downforeveryoneorjustme.com is more useful, in that it supports any website and allows you to ascertain whether the block is local or international in nature.

Twitter Down 1

Twitter Down 2

BTW, Twitter is more down than up as I type this in and is apparently recovering from a DoS attack. And users in the US also report that Facebook is sluggish.

In WordPress.com goes down – A chink in the “cloud” and how to plan for it I look at contingency planning for Web 2.0 outages such as this.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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