Twitter was down around the globe for at least two hours today after being hit by a denial-of-service attack. By 8:16am in California, the site was back up for most US users. Less than an hour later, Twitter was again working in the UK.

Denial-of-service attacks overload websites with meaningless requests for data in order to slow them down, or take them offline altogether.

While Twitter has suffered from availability issues in the past, those were most often caused by the company’s inadequate infrastructure, or an overload of traffic to the site.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posted a brief update to the company blog:

On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. 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 continue to defend and later investigate.

Tags: denial of service, twitter

August 6, 2009 5:18pm in Digital media, Internet | Comment