Just helping to spread the word…

If you’re wondering why you can’t access Twitter this morning, there’s a reason. Twitter is down and according to the official status blog, the company is defending against an aggressive denial-of-service attack.

On the official Twitter blog, company c0-founder Biz Stone shed some light on the situation:

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.

Update:

Twitter is back in action according to the Twitter blog:

The continuing denial of service attack is being mitigated although there is still degraded service for some folks while we recover completely.

Over the last few hours, Twitter has been working closely with other companies and services affected by what appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack. As to the motivation behind this event, we prefer not to speculate.

Please note that no user data was compromised in this attack. This activity is about saturating a service with so many requests that it cannot respond to legitimate requests thereby denying service to intended customers or users.

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Tagged as: dos, down, Twitter