THE TELEGRAPH: Twitter has gone down after the microblogging website became the victim of what the company believes was a co-ordinated attack.
The site crashed at around 2pm UK time, and remained offline for several hours. Twitter users around the world were unable to use the service, and could not send or receive messages, known a tweets.
Twitter confirmed that the outage had been caused by malicious attempts to overload its servers. This technique, known as a distributed denial of service attack, is widely used by hackers, cybercriminals and spammers to flood a website's servers with access requests, leaving ordinary traffic unable to connect to the server, and causing the system to overload and crash.
Hackers use a network of compromised computers, called a "botnet", to launch these attacks. Computer users are often unaware that their machine has been infected with a virus, worm or malicious software that allows hackers to gain remote access to their PC.
Twitter said that although the microblogging service was up and running again, it was still defending against the attack, and was attempting to recover and provide a normal service. >>> Claudine Beaumont, Technology Editor | Thursday, August 06, 2009
