Twitter suffers denial of service attack


6 Aug 2009

Following over an hour of downtime today, micro-blogging site Twitter has reported on its status blog that it is ‘defending against a denial-of-service attack’.

While Twitter is suffering downtime, so too have social networking site Facebook and community blogging site LiveJournal been experiencing on and off outages throughout the day.

Without a full report available yet from Twitter and with no official word as of yet from Facebook or LiveJournal it is not yet known if the problems are associated.

Twitter cop-founder Biz Stone said on the official company blog: “On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users.

“We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.”