TimesOnline Reports
The micro-blogging site Twitter has come under attack this afternoon, taking it down for more than an hour.
On the site's corporate blog, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said: "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."
The site is now back up and running, though Twitter said, "we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.
Graham Cluley, from the internet security specialist Sophos, explained on his blog: "A denial of service attack occurs when computers bombard a website with requests for information.
"Typically hackers can control thousands of innocent users' computers centrally and command them to visit a site that they wish to flood with traffic - making it impossible for other internet users to get through.
"It's a bit like 15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time - nothing can move. In the meantime, micro-bloggers around the world are likely to be left twiddling their thumbs."
Over the years, Twitter has experienced downtime like this before, but the cases have become increasingly infrequent as the site's stability has grown. The site has seen a huge rise in popularity in recent months, experiencing a 22-fold increase in traffic in the past year, according to Hitwise, the internet analysts. Twitter is now the 38th most visited site in the UK.
Reports suggested it was the first time the site has gone down in four months, and potentially the first time due to sabotage. The motive for the attack is as unclear as the identity of those responsible.
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