Twitter came under fire from hackers in a distributed attack
Its a IT administrators worst nightmare - the dreaded DDOS (distributed denial of service attack). In layman's terms, DDOS is a coordinated attempt to bring down a web site by sending it more data than it is equipped to handle. Think of it like millions of stones being thrown at your from every direction - it is enough to make you ball up into the fetal position.
That's what happened today to many of the most popular social networking sites.
Twitter was especially affected. Here it is 3:00pm in the afternoon and the site is still sluggish and non-responsive. Facebook came under attack this morning as well but has seemed to weather the storm.
The scary thing is that attacks like these are a dime-a-dozen. DDOS attacks are brute force attempts to take down a web site and in general aren't especially sophisticated. That must be of concern to Twitter as it attempts to be a viable communication tool for personal and business use. These days, thousands of companies rely on Twitter as a vehicle to communicate with customers from a customer service perspective, or even for pubic relations. Twitter has become the new de-facto standard for getting messages out over the Internet - much like "texting" has become a primary means for communicating over a cell phone.
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