Twitter in Denial of Service Attack

For those of you who searched for Twitter today & found that it wasn't there, the site was taken down by a denial of service (or DDOS) attack.

"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack," said company co-founder Biz Stone on the company's blog.

It is estimated that there are over 45 million users of Twitter, making the service on of critical importance for people, businesses and Internet Marketing companies alike.

"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users." said Stone.

UPDATE:

The Register reports that the attack was the result of a JoeJob spamming campaign.Joejobs are spam messages that are designed not to push Viagra but to induce someone to click on a link in the hopes of harming the site being linked to. Essentially, millions of people get an email that says something benign like "Please click the link to my blog"; the link points to Twitter rather than the blog & people clicking on it are not aware of the harm that they're causing.