There was a quake here in Jakarta and the resulting hug of death took the governments site offline briefly - but their twitter account was fine. It worked as a great CDN!
Semi-related - when everyone evacuated their office blocks and stood on the road it flooded the cell towers making internet browsing impossible. But whatsapp continued to connect intermittently making it relatively fine to use.
Not saying these types of channels should be used in place of the actual emergency protocols in the phone network. But no harm broadcasting if you can keep them secure.
I'm really doubting any government infrastructure these days.
When vendors can sell crap like weblogic to an org that really only needs an easy to update static site; and the taxpayer ends up on the hook for it.
There are efforts in progress to fix things https://www.usds.gov/ but they are slow and prone to being sabotaged by the aforementioned vendors.
You can't rely on private companies, especially with foreign investors to provide critical infrastructure.
Its a great way to stay out of responsibility as a security consultant or admin. Always trust for the users to poke the biggest hole, so you have something to point to when the water floats the ship.
Kind of floored that twitter is what the government has to use to put a notification out to it's public to provide critical information.
But then I continued to read and the article goes on to say that twitter and other social media was used by the Governor after the emergency text message was sent out, which means it obviously isn't a primary source of information.
So actually it's just clickbait journalism. Anyone panicking in the area would have almost certainly picked up a text before getting anything over twitter.
What is pretty terrible is that the governor of Hawaii most likely doesn't have 2FA on his twitter account and keeps the password on his phone, probably in a notes app of some kind, and is willing to publicly admit that.