The Social Web Ends Up Talking to the Plant in the Corner

Yesterday, I signed up for Twitter. I have a lot of issues with Twitter. Sure: Brevity is... wit. But, where will it go? Why is that we've had the spectre of Orwell's 1984 and the long reach of the PATRIOT Act to fear then we turn around and type in moment to moment updates of our lives into this information nexus?
According to ReadWriteWeb, Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal are all down. I have to wonder if it's a coincidence. Do they all use similar technology that could be an achilles heel? Could it be some vulnerability in Ajax and/or JSON that is letting exploits and requests fly in at an unprecedented speed?
Is this revenge from opponents to free speech like China, North Korea or Iran? It wouldn't be too hard to zombie a bunch of machines or a cluster with faked IPs and then pound on the Ajax servers with millions of little requests that choke out responses. No? Then why is it that Facebook proper seems up, but its Ajax requests handled by its CDN are all chokey?
Maybe it's more basic? Thanks to APIs, all of these sites are interconnected sharing data and when one trips another falls.

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