Twitter crippled by web attack

Twitter,the popular micro-blogging service,was crippled on Thursday morning by a denial-of-service attack.

The extended silence in a normally noisy Twitterworld began around 9 am,according to TechCrunch. Later,Twitter posted a note to its status update page saying the site had been slowed to a standstill by an attack.

In a denial-of-service attack,hackers typically direct a botnet,often made up of thousands of malware-infected home PCs,toward a target site in an effort to flood it with junk traffic. With the site overwhelmed,legitimate visitors cannot access the service.

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On this… 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, co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.

At about 11 am,Twitter updated its status site with a note saying,The site is back up,but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack. However,many visitors were still finding the site inaccessible.

Facebook was also slow on Thursday,and several blogs,including Mashable,say it is related to the Twitter attack. The Wall Street Journals Digits blog reported that LiveJournal,a blogging site,was also down at one point,although it appeared to be functioning normally at 12.45 pm.