Concerted Cyberattack Shuts Down Twitter

In a possible first for Twitter, a malicious attack shut down the service entirely today, Wired reports. The denial-of-service assault flooded the site's server with requests, overloading it and blocking legitimate users from gaining access for about three hours; Tweeters are now slowly regaining access.

“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack,” wrote co-founder Biz Stone. “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.” (More Twitter stories.)