Twitter, Facebook hit by denial-of-service attacks

BEIJING, August 7 (Xinhuanet) -- Twitter users around the world were unable to tweet on Thursday after the site was taken down by a denial-of-service attack. The popular social network site Facebook also reported problems and several other social media sites, including Gawker and Live Journal, said they too were affected.

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. The methods, motives and targets of a DoS attack may vary, but it generally consists of concerted efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all.

Twitter release a statement on their site saying, "We are defending against a denial of service attack, and will update status again shortly". On Friday morning the company said they were making some recovery but that problems still existed.

In a blog post on Thursday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the company preferred not to speculate about the motivation of the malicious attack that took the site offline and made it inaccessible for several hours.