Twitter Attacked by Hacker
A HACKER attack shut down Twitter overnight, and Facebook and LiveJournal were also “looking into” possible site problems.
A post on the Twitter blog by co-founder Biz Stone said that Twitter was the victim of a denial of service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website’s servers with communications requests.
“We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate,” read the posting.
Facebook was also experiencing problems.
Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said the company was looking into it and would have an update “as soon as possible”.
The Twitter outage began at about 9am, according to Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer at web performance monitoring company AlertSite.
The site still had access problems a few hours later.
LiveJournal was also hit with the DDoS attack, PC Mag reports.
“The company cannot 100 per cent confirm that it is the same attack that plagued Twitter this morning, but “it would be a huge coincidence if they aren’t tied to one another,” a spokesman said.
Things are now back to normal on LiveJournal.com, he said.