Twitter Coming Back Online After Denial-of-Service Attack

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on August 6, 2009 - 6:56am.

San Francisco - The Twitter microblogging service has not been accessible on Thursday, due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. "We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly," the company wrote in a blog post at 8 a.m. PDT.

"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," wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

The site appears to be slowly coming back online, but remains inaccessible or slow for many of Twitter's over 30 million users.

"As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We're working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can," the company said.

Meanwhile, Facebook also reported a slowdown in service Thursday morning that "resulted in a short period of degraded site experience for some visitors."

Facebook added that the company is "investigating potential foul play at this time."

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090806-717961.html

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/twitter-apparently-down/