Twitter Hit By Denial of Service Attack

If you tried to hit up Twitter some time in the last couple of hours, you probably got a friendly note from your Web browser saying that it’s not happening. It turns out, the social messaging site was hit by a denial of service attack this morning — that is, an external attack meant to prevent people from accessing a site. Often, these attacks bombard a Web site with communications requests, making it difficult or impossible for users to get through. Twitter’s back up now, but it seems the attack is ongoing. Twitter’s status blog merely says that “we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.” It’s just a couple hours without Twitter, but it’s frightening that this can just happen out of the blue. [Twitter via Wired]