Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, suffered an outage on Thursday after a hacking incident. A post on the blog by co-founder Biz Stone said Twitter was the victim of a denial of service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website’s servers with communications requests.
“We are defending against this attack and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate,” read the posting. Asked for comments on the outage in an email, Twitter’s Stone referred to the blog post.
Stone said the attack is not related to a recent incident in which a hacker stole internal documents from the site. “There’s no indication that this attack is related to any previous activities. We are currently the target of a denial of service attack,” he said. “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.”
Twitter’s site went down around 9:30 am on Thursday. A message posted on Twitter’s blog said the site was active again by 11:30 am, but that the site remained under attack. Twitter says it will update the public with information as it becomes available.
Facebook issues: Facebook also seemed to be experiencing problems, at least intermittently. Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said the firm was looking into it and would have an update “as soon as possible.”
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