A couple of hours ago Twitter experienced the longest downtime in history which resulted in a global 'black out' for the online micro blogging website. The site went down on the Thursday morning leaving millions of Twitterers frustrated.
Initially the twitter team was not clear about the problem as it posted on the twitter status blog:
Site is down, we are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.
Upon further investigation, it was finally declared that the server went down because of a denial-of-service attack as posted on the twitter blog:
On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack.
Denial of Service attack is an attempt of paralyzing a server by increasing the work load of a server through external communication methods. This results in the consumption of the server's resources, which bars the actual users from using the 'victim' machine.
According to reports twitter is under a massive hack attack this time. Pertinent to know that twitter had been into the headlines in the past for its security loop-holes. We saw a number of twitter accounts being hacked be some hacker, leaking secret information.
The Twitter team is working on the problem as said by the Twitter blog:
We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.
Though Twitter is back but users are experiencing unusual delays and time-outs. Highlighting the matter, the twitter status blog says:
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.
Others sites which experienced a similar DDoS attack were Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube. The attack was generated from some parts of Russia and Germany.