Twitter hacked?

According to BARBARA ORTUTAY from ASSOCIATED PRESS, New York, Twitter was hacked Thursday, due to a denial-of-service attack hence disabling the fast-growing messaging service for hours. As at 5.45pm, Twitter is accessable but very slow.

Twitter said it was hit with a denial-of-service attack. That's when hackers command scores of computers to a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through.

The attacks appear to have been related to the Russia-Georgia political conflict. They started with a flurry of spam e-mail sent out Thursday morning that contained links to pages written by a single activist on multiple social networking sites, said Bill Woodcock, research director of the San Francisco-based Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit that tracks Internet traffic.

When people clicked on the links, they were taken to legitimate Web pages, but the traffic overwhelmed some servers and disrupted service, Woodcock said.

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

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

Facebook, whose users encountered intermittent problems Thursday, also was the subject of a denial-of-service attack, though it was not known whether the same hackers were involved. Facebook said no user information was at risk.

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