First to fall was LiveJournal, which began reporting database problems on the LiveJournal Status page at 8:58 am ET; downrightnow immediately picked up the announcement.  Kudos to LJ for acknowledging the issue and keeping users informed.

User reports of Twitter trouble started at 9:07 am and downrightnow immediately reported a possible outage.  By 9:36 am, we were receiving even more reports and upgraded our evaluation to a likely service disruption. At 9:40 am, TechCrunch picked up the story.  It wasn’t until approximately 9:55 am that Twitter posted its first official announcement, saying:

We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.

Another official update followed at around 11:00 am that broke the news: Twitter had identified a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.  We wish Twitter good luck in dealing with the attack and their announcements are definitely appreciated.  For those keeping score, we will also point out that downrightnow users were notified of potential service trouble 30 minutes before it was widely reported by TechCrunch, and 45 minutes before Twitter itself acknowledged the issue.  Thanks to everyone who submitted a report!

Finally, our outage-weary users also began complaining of trouble at Facebook by 10:35 am.  We reported a temporary service disruption and have continued to monitor the social network’s status as intermittent user reports have continued to flow in, both from downrightnow users and on Twitter (which now appears mostly recovered).  Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t provide official announcements or updates on service issues, so its users are left in the dark (those who aren’t downrightnow users, that is).  We hope Facebook will follow the lead of other services such as LiveJournal and Twitter who communicate with their users during service trouble.  Until then, we’ll continue to keep you updated with the best information available.

As always, you can keep an eye on these services and others all in one place at downrightnow.com.

Update: According to Mashable, Facebook and LiveJournal have also confirmed that DDoS attacks are contributing to their service disruptions today.  Though it’s not clear whether the same attackers are behind all 3 incidents, the timing does raise suspicion.  Rumors that downrightnow commissioned the onslaught in order to boost traffic are entirely unsubstantiated. :)