Twitter has been under atack by a “denial of service” bug, which shut the site down for about two hours on Thursday morning, causing headaches in the online community and glitches in other Web sites like Facebook. A denial of service attack essentially is an attempt to flood a Web site with so much information that it must shut down.
In a blog post on Twitter’s service website, Twitter says it will update the public with more information as it becomes available. “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 defend and later investigate,” the message says.
Twitter’s site went down around 9:30 a.m. ET on Thursday. A message posted on Twitter’s status blog said the site was active again by 11:30 a.m., but that the site remained under attack. Attempts to use the site have been unsuccessful as of 10:30 a.m. PT.