Twitter vanishes from the web in malicious cyber-attack

August 6, 2009 by Infowars Ireland

www.dailymail.co.uk

Twitter, the site used buy hundreds of celebrities and millions of Internet users, has vanished from the Internet.

The site has gone offline, with the company confirming it was a ‘denial of service’ cyber-attack.

Less than an hour after the attack, the company said: ‘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.’

The statement was posted on Twitter’s official blog.

It’s not clear when the outage began, but it appears to have started mid-morning Eastern time, or around 3pm GMT.

An update on Twitter’s status page – at 4.45pm this evening – said the site was ‘back up’, and American commentators said they could access the site.

However it still does not appear to be working in the UK.

A typical ‘distributed denial of service’ attack is where those responsible infiltrate hundreds or thousands of computers with a virus, which then orders each computer to repeatedly ‘visit’ the website at a certain time.

This can caused hundreds of thousands of extra visits a second, overloading even the most well-prepared websites.

Major Internet services including Twitter do undergo unplanned outages from time to time because of overcapacity and other problems. Read full article…