Twitter silenced due to denial of service attack

Like many Mac users, we at TUAW are big Twitter fans (and also fans of some of the great iPhone and Mac clients for the service). Early this Thursday morning, Twitter became unavailable due to a denial of service attack, according to Biz Stone, Twitter's co-founder. Such attacks are deliberate attempts to disrupt service for malicious purposes.

Twitter came sporadically back online at around 9:15am EST after being down for roughly two and a half hours. As of 9:46 EST Twitter reported that they were working on restoring full service and that the system may be slow to respond to some users.

In my case, at around 1:45p EST, it took three or four minutes for Twitter to be accessible. The company's status blog says they are still working on addressing the issue.

[via InformationWeek]