Twitter Under Attack

If you are having trouble accessing Twitter today the service is apparently under heavy denial-of-service (DoS) attacks since around 9am EST. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone states, “We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to … investigate.”

A denial-of-service attack is characterized by an explicit attempt by attackers to prevent legitimate users of a service from accessing that service, commonly carried out by groups within the hacking community. The basic idea is to cripple servers by flooding them with more requests then they can handle.