Twitter suffers 'denial of service' attack

Twitter founder Biz Stone said the site, which was down altogether for about two hours, had suffered a so-called "denial of service" attack.
"We are defending against this attack," Stone said.
He added that Twitter would continue to update its site even though it remained under attack, and noted that the situation would be subjected to an investigation.
In a denial of service attack, hackers try to prevent access to a site by overloading it or bombarding it mainly with spam. As Stone explained, this kind of attack is most often used against online banking and credit card systems.
Twitter’s famous microblogging website attracted a total of 44.5 million unique visitors worldwide in June 2009, according to data on comScore. The Twitter outage began at about 1830 IST, still had lingering access problems midday.