As I noted earlier today, Twitter was down for several hours today thanks to a Denial of Service (DoS) attack:
(CNN) — Internet attacks shut down the social networking site Twitter for about two hours on Thursday morning and caused glitches in other sites like Facebook and LiveJournal, a blogging site.
It’s unclear if the attacks were coordinated against the social media sites.
Twitter says its site’s blackout was caused by a “denial of service attack,” which likely means a hacker used a herd of infected computers to send bad information to the site to overwhelmed it.
A post to Twitter’s blog said its Web site was back online before noon ET, but the site’s users still were reporting problems.
And yet, somehow, civilization survived.

August 6th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
It wasn’t really any different from the scheduled maintenance they occasionally do in the middle of the day, instead of at night like they should.