Twitter goes down due to DOS attack

Twitter was taken offline for several hours today due to a denial of service attack (DDoS). Twitter confirmed the attack via a post on its official blog earlier today.

The statement reads:

“We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.”

Twitter also reports that the service has been resumed but they are still continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.

The latest update from Twitter regarding the DOS attack on the Twitter Status Blog Reads:

Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.

Users are also experiencing outages and extremely long page load times with Facebook today, maybe due to the flood of Twitter traffic heading over to Facebook to get their social network fix.