Hacker shuts down Twitter for hours

NEW YORK (AP) — A hacker attack Thursday shut down the fast-growing messaging service Twitter for hours, and Facebook experienced intermittent access problems.

Twitter said in its status blog Thursday morning 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.

The fact that a relatively common attack could disable such a well-known Web site shows just how young and vulnerable Twitter still is, even as it quickly becomes a household name used by celebrities, large corporations, small businesses and even protesters in Iran.

“Clearly, they need a stronger infrastructure to be able to fight this kind of attack,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at computer security firm Sophos. Twitter’s tech support teams, he added, “must be frankly out of breath” trying to keep up with the site’s enormous growth.

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

“I had to Google-search Twitter to find out what was going on, when normally my Twitter feed gives me all the breaking news I need,” said Alison Koski, a New York public-relations manager. She added she felt “completely lost” without Twitter.

The Twitter outage began about 9 a.m. EDT and lasted a few hours.

Facebook, whose users encountered intermittent problems Thursday morning, also was the subject of a denial-of-service attack, though it was not known whether the same hackers were involved. Unlike Twitter, Facebook never became completely inaccessible. Face- book said no user information was at risk.

By early afternoon, both Twitter and Facebook seemed to be functioning, giving cubicle-bound social- media addicts a collective sigh of relief. Twitter warned, though, that as it recovers, “users will experience some longer load times and slowness.”

Technology business analyst Shelly Palmer told AP Radio that denial-of-service attacks are a reality of the information age.

“People tend to want to take sites that are very public and go after them,” said Palmer, managing director of Advanced Media Ventures Group.