Twitter shut after cyber attack
Updated on 06 August 2009
Micro-blogging site Twitter goes offline after a so-called "denial of service attack" this afternoon.
A message posted on the Twitter blog said that the social networking site had been the target of a coordinated and malicious attack which took the site offline.
A denial of service attack generally happens when a malicious party attempts to overwhelm a site by consuming its resources. The procedure is sometimes used to make unavailable sites such as online banking.
The blog post added that Twitter was defending against the attack.
It was not clear exactly when the site went down, but it appeared to have become unavailable from mid-afternoon in the UK.
A message appeared on the site's status blog later in the afternoon, saying the site was back up - although it still appeared to be inaccessible.
The update said: "We are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack."
