DENVER — Coordinated Internet attacks on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking websites shut down and slowed the services to a crawl Thursday, leaving local social media aficionados unable to conduct business, converse with friends and contacts or check news, even late into the evening.
“When you’re doing things like launching a blog for a day, a marketing initiative or telling people what you’re doing tonight, it’s really hard to get the news out because that’s your network,” said Erika Napoletano, director of communications for InvestorLoft.com, speaking about the Twitter outage. The company is a Denver-based website where investors search for real estate property.
Napoletano and about 75 other local social media enthusiasts — branded with nametags that also included their Twitter handles — gathered Thursday night for a conference hosted downtown by social media blog Mashable, one of the most popular blogs worldwide, according to the site Technorati.com.