Twitter hit by attack, shut down two hours

Twitter, the popular-and-growing microblog site, went down for a couple of hours this morning, creating further havoc on Facebook and other sites that feed from it.

At 1:17 p.m., the first I'd heard of this, I was able to send something off from the Twitter site. Was a little slow getting on the site, though, and part of that time was spent staring at the above message. Anyway, here's my test post:

ericsomething Oh, Twitter was down? I must not get around much.

So much for that. I have several services that get feeds from Twitter. Like, my iGoogle homepage. Facebook. And this blog. And I use Twitter, though not often and most of it is through text messages.

In truth, I never really noticed the Twitter lapse. Others, you can bet they were clawing walls.

Excerpt, from CNN:

... In an e-mail to CNN.com, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the site was hit with a "denial of service attack," or an attempt to shut the site down by overwhelming it with traffic ... "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 defend and later investigate." Twitter's site went down around 9:30 a.m. ET on Thursday. A message posted on Twitter's status blog said the site was active again by 11:30 a.m., but that the site remained under attack ...

Update: How they dunnit:

... for the culprits, all it took to snarl the popular social-networking site was one of the oldest tools in the Internet hacker handbook: the Distributed Denial-of-Service attack (commonly shortened to DDoS), a method that has been used in the past to crash some of the Web's largest sites, including Yahoo! to CNN ... DDoS attacks are surprisingly low tech ...