Pingwire (and Stephen Fry) take down TwitPic

14 July 2009 10:08 GMT / By Duncan Geere

The power of vast quantities of traffic can wreck even the hardiest websites, as seen this morning as links to a website called Pingwire began to circulate on Twitter.

The site scans Twitter for image links and then displays them in a grid, so you can see what everyone's been sharing, however NSFW it might be. The temptation to check out other people's photos proved too much to resist, and the site spread like wildfire, including an endorsement from Twitter star Stephen Fry.

Unfortunately, Twitpic appeared to baulk at the traffic generated and briefly went down, presenting a database error. The site appears to have now blocked Pingwire from accessing it, because it's back online but Pingwire's still not displaying any photos.

One Twitter user, @alecmuffet, dubbed it a CDoS attack - a celebrity denial of service. Still, there's a whole host of other sites that do the same thing. Picfog is one of them, and can be found in the links below. Do you have any other favourites? Drop them in the comments.

Full tags

Software, Online, Websites, Pingwire, Twitter, TwitPic