CircleID

The Twitter micro-blogging service was knocked offline this morning for several hours as a result of a denial of service attack (DDoS). Twitter has confirmed and reported the attack in a post on its official blog earlier today: "We are defending against this [DDos] attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate." The company later reported that the service as been resumed but they are still continuing to defend against and recover from this attack. No further updates have been provided yet. Several sources are also reporting problems with Facebook today.

Updates:  UPDATED Aug 13, 2009 8:29 AM PST
Twitter, DDoS and the Motivations Behind the Attack Terry Zink, CircleID, Aug.11.2009
Cutting Through the Twitter DDoS Hype Stefan Tanase, CircleID, Aug.7.2009
Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter New York Times, Aug.8.2009
Twitter Still Struggling to Recover From DOS Attack PCWorld, Aug.7.2009
Russia-Georgia Conflict Blamed for Twitter, Facebook Outages Brian Krebs, Washington Post
Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user CNet News, Aug.7.2009

Related topics: Cyberattack, Security