[nastyasiwannabe]

I'm suggesting this just so someone more knowledgeable can debunk it. Suppose FBI or someone up there had a meeting and said "in three weeks, there could be millions of armed Americans who believe that democracy was just stolen from them by some evil dictator in a massive globalist conspiracy. These people love twitter. Is there a way to make twitter go down without making it look like we're suddenly pulling the plug?" The answer was yes, we'll do a test run Friday.

[galdosdi]

I'll bite.

It would take a lot longer than a couple of hours of twitter being down for that to have a useful effect. For something as major as the presidential election result, it would probably take minimum a week before people got bored and moved on to a different topic.

So this kind of attack that only takes something out for a few hours would have no useful effect for an actor that wants to prevent people from discussing a recent event.

IMHO, it would be hard in general to take out a service run by a serious IT organization (of which there are admittedly few, by my definition of serious) for more than a few days unless the attacker carried out non-trivial physical damage (eg, bombing multiple datacenters, murdering multiple system administrators, etc) or managed to somehow destroy enough backups (which in a serious IT shop, should be hard, as there should be some offline cold backups that require physical human activity to destroy)

[nastyasiwannabe]

Sure it wouldnt work for an extended time. I'm just thinking that in an unpredictable situation, a few hours might be all you need to diffuse it. For example suppose someone claims they have evidence of some crazy shit happening at the polling places, and the only thing that can be done is to for Patriots to seize the equipment at the polling places before the globalists can cover their tracks.

[Raphmedia]

Why do a test run at all? So that every security expert is on edge when it does happen?

... Perhaps if you try to argue that they did it in order to make sure everyone was on edge for the election... but even then it makes very little sense.

[jlgaddis]

If the government wanted to shut them down, it would likely be easier for them to just get a judge to issue an order (an NSL, perhaps?) to Twitter's upstream Internet providers to cut off their service.

[oldmanjay]

Do you really think of twitter as the center of right-wing lunacy?