Twitter Attack Knocks Out Service Again

Twitter's servers were hit Aug. 11 with another distributed denial-of-service attack, sending the microblogging service crashing down. 

Around 3 p.m. EDT, Twitter posted an updated to its status blog stating that it was experiencing a site outage and was examining the nature of the attack. Later, Alex Payne, platform lead at Twitter, posted on a bulletin board that the Website was undergoing another wave of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. 

"Expect periodic slowness and errors until the attack passes or is countered by our operations team and hosting provider," Payne wrote. "Updates will be provided as we get them."

The situation follows a DDoS attack Aug. 6 that knocked out Twitter and affected numerous other sites, including Facebook, LiveJounal and YouTube. In that case, some security researchers believe the DDoS attack was part of an effort to silence a pro-Georgian blogger with an act of hacktivism. The attack affected Twitter for several hours.

The Aug. 11 attack subsided relatively quickly. But, according to Payne, it picked up again later in the day. 

"We're trying to work with [Twitter's service provider] to ensure minimal impact to the API, but in the near term there may be issues with OAuth and the Streaming API ," Payne wrote on the bulletin board. "This is a bit of a juggling act, as we're trying to coordinate our team, the operations team, our service provider's staff and specialists that they've
brought in for this issue."

The service appears to be functioning at the moment.