Twitter still in defence mode
2009-08-06 19:48
San Francisco - Hackers shut down wildly popular micro-blogging site Twitter for more than two hours on Thursday before engineers at the California firm were able to get it back online.
Hot online social networking service Facebook was also reportedly experiencing woes and trying to root out the cause.
Twitter's engineers also warned that "we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack".
"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in an official company blog.
"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," he said.
Zombie computers
Hackers evidently employed a classic denial-of-service (DoS) attack in which legions of zombie computers, machines infected with viruses, are commanded to simultaneously visit a website.
Such massive onslaught of demand can overwhelm website servers, slowing service or knocking it offline.
The DoS attack hit Twitter about 06:00 (14:00 SA time).
Access to the website continued to be slow, with some aspiring users getting messages telling them that connections had "timed out" because Twitter computers were taking too long to respond.
After the service resumed, Twitter user Benjamin Hobbs fired off a message saying he "wishes the Denial-of-Service idiots would get a life and leave Twitter alone".
Weapon for anti-censorship
While an everyday chatting tool for many, Twitter has become a weapon used by dissidents to circumvent censorship in places where freedom of speech is suppressed.
Cyber-sympathisers from around the world joined forces through Twitter in June to help Iranian protestors dodge censorship, get out news of violent clashes and avoid real-world capture following Iran's disputed election.
Cyber attacks on web pages of Iranian opposition figures have continued in the aftermath of the controversial presidential election in Iran.