Twitter Co-Founder Confirms DoS Attack

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, has confirmed that Twitter was subject to a denial-of-service attack Thursday morning.

Writing on the Twitter Blog, Stone confirmed that his company was hit by a DoS attack and that the microblogginig service is still actively working to defend against the malicious action.

"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial-of-service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter, for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate," Stone wrote.

An update to the Twitter status blog posted at approximately 11:00 AM EDT claims that site is back up. However, it appears that the DoS attacks still have rendered the site unavailable.

The service was down for nearly two hours, but Twitter claimed the service was back up as approximately 11:00 AM EDT. The outages first started to appear around 9:00 AM EDT, and connecting to the service has been sporadic since, with occasional updates getting through. However, it appears that the majority of users have been able to access the service.

"We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly," Twitter wrote on its status blog at 10:48 AM EDT.

Twitter's Fail Whale -- the error message image the service displays when it undergoes outages -- may be somewhat familiar these days, but that doesn't mean that Twitter downtime and outages go unnoticed, particularly when the downtime is due to a malicious attack on the rapidly growing service.

Twitter first addressed the downtime around 10:00 AM EDT, noting that the service was down and that it was looking into the cause. It has now apparently become clear to Twitter that a denial of service attack is taking place and the microblogging service is working to defend against it.