[Here’s an explanation](https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057)
TL;DR: Modern sites like Twitter have two parts: Frontend and Backend.
When you go to twitter.com, your browser loads and runs code which queries the twitter.com backend service. If your browser loaded this code successfully it can keep on running no matter what happens afterwards — your computer downloaded it, your computer is all that is needed for it to work and try and do something. For instance this code periodically checks whether anything new happened.
Apparently this code was retrying too aggressively, so when the backend broke, the frontend kept trying. So any person with a browser pointed at twitter.com is constantly firing off a mass of requests at Twitter’s servers. Apparently at the rate of 10 requests per second.
This technically works as a DDoS — it’s distributed, in that it’s something being done by lots of computers world-wide. And it causes a further denial of service because it floods Twitter’s servers with a huge volume of requests.
I think by now this problem is likely already gone. This is two days old news, so I’m sure by now they already patched it up.
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