Twitter Goes Down in Denial-of-Service Attack

Microblogging service Twitter this morning suffered downtime due to what company officials described as a denial-of-service attack.

The site went offline for several hours, although some pages loaded sporadically.

While Twitter said on its status page that the site was “back up” as of around 11 a.m. Eastern time, much of the site remained inaccessible.

“We are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack,” the company added.

It’s the latest blow for Twitter, for which much of its early months of service were spent contending with unexpected downtime due to overcapacity and other issues. In more recent months, the company has been wrestling with a growing number of Twitter-spread malware and information-theft attacks.

The site also had to contend with a security breach when internal documents were stolen through a hijacked account and published on the
Internet.

Some of the problems — coupled with the lack of control IT admins have over content posted to Twitter and similar sites — have prompted organizations to reconsider their use of the service. Most recently, the Pentagon on Tuesday began a security review of the threat posted by Web 2.0 sites.