Twitter breaks down for two hours

Co-founder Biz Stone said that a 'denial of service attack' had hit Twitter, which disrupted an otherwise pleasant morning at Twitter HQ, San Francisco, California.

“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack,” wrote Stone in the official Twitter blog. “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.”

Blogging sites LiveJournal and Facebook are also believed to have been attacked yesterday with the former shutting down for few hours and the latter slowing down dramatically.

Twitter attracted 44.5 million visitors in June according to comScore.

Twitter, which was launched in 2006, recently announced that it would start charging a fees from business users. The company’s decision has not gone down well with users. 

The micro-blogging site has also launched a how-to guide for business users looking to engage with customers on the social media site, in what looks like the first step in a drive to monetise the site.