IRC has always been wonderful in times of trouble. I'm really surprised that people have abandoned it over the last decade.
I had to hit IRC when Sept 11th went down because I was stuck in a facility with no television reception and even news sites were down due to load. The only things that were still shifting data were slashdot and a couple of IRC networks. We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio worldwide including from ham and shortwave.
I wonder if there will be a service that hits the sweet spot of cool community instant messaging over a large group of people in the next generation of technology, I think so.
Taking down an IRC network (assuming DNS is not affected or users have cached list of servers in their client) is incredibly difficult.
Yes, but remember that DDoSing individual servers and taking over channels through the resulting netsplits was a favorite pastime of bored teenagers around the world.
I had to hit IRC when Sept 11th went down because I was stuck in a facility with no television reception and even news sites were down due to load. The only things that were still shifting data were slashdot and a couple of IRC networks. We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio worldwide including from ham and shortwave.