Micro-blogging service Twitter was taken offline in what the company believes was a co-ordinated attack.

The popular site has been subject to a so-called denial-of-service attack, according to the firm's official blog.

Denial-of-service attacks take various forms but often involve a company's servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.

The outage began Thursday morning but the geographic scale of the attack is still not known.

"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack," said company co-founder Biz Stone on the company's blog.

"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."

The service was restored shortly after the blog post, but the company's status page suggests that the site is "continuing to defend against and recover from this attack".

A ComScore study suggests the site had around 45 million users worldwide as of June 2009.

However, as many users interact with the service through mobile phones or third-party software, the actual number of users is likely to be higher.

Source: BBC Website

I hate twitter


The same people on facebook, myspace and other social networking sites will be on twitter. When is it enough?

Hope by some weird thing happening it shuts down.

LOL Cactus,

I have told everyone that unless you are someone worthy of being followed, it is the ultimate case of joblessness

Unless I have something to promote, business-wise, twitter no go ever smell me. I mean, I believe the most popular twitter is a dog or cat if I am not mistaken. That just about sums it up