The Iranian riots of 2009

Twitter was on managed hosting in 2009 and had entered a spike in user-ship that began with the 2008 U.S. Presidential elections. Our service provider had a hard time dealing with the pressure on their network infrastructure from the traffic. Their network was heavily segmented for a diverse user base. In retrospect, theirs was one of the first “private computing” cloud services.

They gave us a deadline for some downtime to perform network maintenance. We had already had two postponements, and were told that the network might fail entirely if we didn’t finally permit the downtime. So we agreed to do so in July of 2009.

Just before the downtime, there was a large popular uprising in Iran and the people there were using the service to communicate and organize their protests.

My manager and I had told upper management that we needed to do this work. We announced it to our users.

The reaction foretold the status of the service as a utility. Not only were there many tweets imploring the company to postpone the work, but our users discovered the customer support telephone number of our provider, a major telecom, and managed to bring down the provider’s support line with a massive volume of calls all asking for them not to carry on with the maintenance.

The irony and significance of this crowd-sourced denial of service via phone calls to their support line was not missed by us, or the provider. We agreed to postpone the maintenance for a few more days. The revolution never happened, or maybe, it did. Only elsewhere, and a few years later.