Tweeters silenced by hacker attack

[okarol]

Tweeters silenced by hacker attack

The Associated Press
Updated: 08/06/2009 08:36:51 AM PDT

A hacker attack shut down Twitter this morning, and Facebook also said it was "looking into" possible site problems.

Twitter said in its status blog that it was "defending against a denial-of-service attack," in which hackers command scores of computers to a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through.

The status blog lets users know about planned outages and other issues on Twitter. This outage was not planned.

Major Internet services including Twitter do undergo unplanned outages from time to time because of overcapacity and other problems.