Hackers attack Twitter; Facebook also slows down

NEW YORK (AP) — A hacker attack today shut down the fast-growing messaging service Twitter, and Facebook also said it was looking into possible site problems.

Twitter said in its status blog today that it was “defending against a denial-of-service attack,” in which hackers command scores of computers to a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through.

For Twitter users, the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down.

The Twitter outage began at about 9 a.m. EDT, said Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer at Web performance monitoring company AlertSite.

The site still had lingering access problems midday, though both Twitter and Facebook seemed to be functioning at least intermittently, giving cubicle-bound social media addicts a collective sigh of relief.