Twitter suffers fresh cyber attacks

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 11 (Xinhua) -- Twitter went down briefly on Tuesday after the micro-blogging website suffered a new round of cyber attacks.

"We're currently experiencing another wave of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against our system," Alex Payne, Twitter's platform lead, said in an online discussion group.

"Expect periodic slowness and errors until the attack passes oris countered by our operations team and hosting provider," Payne added.

In a latest status report posted on its blog, Twitter said: "We're back up and analyzing the traffic data to determine the nature of this attack."

Twitter was shut down for several hours late last week by massively coordinated denial-of-service attacks. Similar attacks also slowed down the operations of social networking website Facebook.

It was reported that last week's attacks may have targeted a blogger in Georgia.

The attacks on Twitter appeared to have been "geopolitical in motivation," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said last Friday.

"However, we don't feel it's appropriate to engage in speculative discussion about these motivations," he noted.