For two times in less than a week Twitter, the micro-blogging phenomenon, has been briefly taken down by
hacker attacks and rendered unusable.
Twitter hasn't officially said what caused Twitter's second outage since Aug. 6, which took the site down around 3 p.m. on Tuesday for about 20 minutes.
The last update regarding Tuesday's outage on the Twitter status blog said Twitter was back up and running.
"We're back up and analyzing the traffic data to determine the nature of this attack," the blog post noted.
Later, however, Twitter's Alex Payne told Techtree.com that the outage was indeed due to another wave of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
A second wave of DDoS attacks against Twitter shows that hackers have found a hot new target to aim for. It could also mean that the first two successful DDoS attacks against Twitter won't be the last fired upon the micro-blogging site.
Tuesday's outage, while a nuisance, was much less severe than the previous Thursday, when a DDoS attack took Twitter down for more than two hours, leaving its 45 million users without the popular service.
Some information security researchers have said last week's Twitter DDoS attack was aimed at one specific user. That attack also affected other social media sites like Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube. Researchers indicate that last week's DDoS attacks were aimed at pro-Georgian blogger Cyxymu, who blogged about the anniversary of Russia's Georgia invasion. Cyxymu had accounts on all of the targeted social media sites and told The Guardian that the attacks were a deliberate attempt to silence his pro-Georgian message by the Kremlin.
