The Wall Street Journal's Jerry Dicolo reports that Twitter Says it was Hit By 'Denial of Service' Attack
Twitter Inc. said it's fighting off a coordinated Web attack that has made its popular microblogging site inaccessible for several hours Thursday morning.
"We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly," the company said in a blog post shortly before 11 a.m. EDT, Thursday.
In an update to the blog post, Twitter said its site is back online, but that the company is "continuing to defend against and recover from this attack." Not surprisingly, posts related to the cyber attack have soared to the top of Twitter's most popular topics queue now that the site is back online.
Social-networking giant Facebook Inc. also had network issues this morning, with some users reporting that certain features have been slow or not working.
Facebook said no user data was at risk and that the problems are now mostly resolved. The site is still monitoring the situation.
Denial-of-service attacks are a common weapon employed by cyber criminals to disrupt the working of Web sites. Perpetrators enlist millions of computers to attempt to access a particular site. The site cannot handle the massive increase in traffic, and is rendered inaccessible.
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