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Twitter: “You Are Not a Target Until You Become Popular”

Andrew LaVallee

Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, called the service’s recent attacks a sign of its significance in a PBS interview that airs Thursday.

“You are not a target until you become popular,” he said, after PBS’s Tavis Smiley commented that the denial-of-service attacks were a “backhanded compliment.”

Mr. Stone said that the outages, which occurred Thursday and again Tuesday, taught the startup that it needed to be ready for online assaults.

“We spent a lot of 2008 sort of catching up with a lot of the popularity of Twitter — unexpected popularity — getting there technically so that we’re stable. And along comes this massive attack,” he said. “We learned a lot from it.

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