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| Twitter website shut after attack | |
| (10 minutes later) | |
| Micro-blogging service Twitter was taken offline in what the company believes was a co-ordinated attack. | |
| The popular site has been subject to a so-called denial-of-service attack, according to the firm's official blog. | |
| Denial-of-service attacks take various forms but often involve a company's servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them. | Denial-of-service attacks take various forms but often involve a company's servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them. |
| The outage began Thursday morning but the geographic scale of the attack is still not known. | |
| "On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack," said company co-founder Biz Stone on the company's 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." | |
| The service was restored shortly after the blog post, but the company's status page suggests that the site is "continuing to defend against and recover from this attack". | |
| A ComScore study suggests the site had around 45 million users worldwide as of June 2009. | |
| However, as many users interact with the service through mobile phones or third-party software, the actual number of users is likely to be higher. |