Denial-of-service attack takes down Twitter

Thu Aug 6, 2009 11:27AM EDT

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Millions of Twitter users cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced as the popular microblogging site buckled under the weight of a denial-of-service attack Thursday morning.

The outage appeared to begin around 9:30 a.m. EST Thursday, and the main Twitter.com site was still inaccessible a couple of hours later.

Over at the official Twitter status page, an update posted around 10:40 a.m. EST said that the service was "defending against a denial-of-service attack" (a sudden, malicious barrage of requests for a single Web site, intended to take the site off the Web).

A short while later, an update noted that "the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack." But as of a quarter after 11 a.m. EST, I still couldn't get Twitter.com to load on my browser.

As engineers as Twitter struggled to get the service back on its feet again, untold millions of Twitterers had to figure out … well, other ways to waste time on the Web.

Many, of course, turned to Facebook, although TechCrunch reports that Facebook was also having issues for a spell. That said, Facebook seemed to be working just fine as of 11 a.m. EST.