Twitter avatars, images disappear after hacking; User information unaffected

As Twitchy reported earlier, the Syrian Electronic Army claimed credit today for hacking the DNS entry for Twitter’s image server, twimg.com. Twitter issued a statement saying that the issue had been resolved and no user information was affected; however, the hacking did cause problems with the serving of images on the service, including user avatars.

https://twitter.com/Circa/status/372495687675416576

Not all users were affected, but those who were saw something like this:

BREAKING (images): my twitter feed is a stream of broken avatars right now pic.twitter.com/fGAFoBVFov

— Derek Eder (@derekeder) August 27, 2013

So how long have @Twitter avatars and pictures in tweets been broken? #sadtrombone

— Daniel J. Schneider (@schneidan) August 27, 2013

Is twitter somewhat broken for anyone else? Random avatars and pictures aren’t working.

— Reid (@ioReid) August 27, 2013

Are #Twitter #avatars only broken for me?

— Sam Steiner (@samsteiner) August 27, 2013

Hmmm…all avatar icons are missing from Twitter.

— Fish_Kungfu (@Fish_Kungfu) August 27, 2013

Is it just me or are Twitter avatars all broken?

— lagarto malo ? (@lagarto_malo) August 27, 2013

https://twitter.com/nickducoff/status/372462763903176704

Huh. Everyone's avatar is a broken image. Just TweetDeck? Just me?

— Kip Hampton (@kiphampton) August 27, 2013

While hackers managed to take down the New York Times website for several hours, some broken avatars doesn’t seem like much of a victory.

https://twitter.com/PLFino/status/372482480944594944

The Syrian Electronic Army, though, is suggesting it could use JavaScript to redirect traffic to its website.

So, do we host http://t.co/70wmrzHCqp with Javascript code so all Twitter users will be redirect to our website? #SEA

— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) August 27, 2013

But unfortunately, our server will not handle that kind of visitors 😛 #SEA

— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) August 27, 2013

Viva Syrian Arab Army, Viva Bashar Al-Assad… Long live #Syria! #SEA

— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) August 27, 2013