Twitter goes down in apparent denial of service attack

Twitter, the popular and ubiquitous (as long as you're over 25) microblogging service was down for several hours on Thursday.

"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. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in the site's official blog today.

The outage began at around 8:00 am EDT, and continued until around 11:00 am, when the Twitter Status Blog was updated to say, "Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack."

The site is still difficult to reach, but has returned to a more stable state. Expectedly, the top trending topics on the freshly-restored site include "DDoS," "Denial-of-Service," "Twitter Status," and the names of several Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, and UberTwitter which were also unresponsive this morning.