Twitter still reeling from DOS attacks

Twitter was down for several hours on Thursday

Twitter has admitted it has yet to fully recover from the denial of service (DOS) attacks which rocked the popular micro-bogging site earlier this week.

In a blog posting yesterday, co-founder of the site Biz Stone said the firm was still working on restoring “access to apps built on the Twitter platform that were affected by defensive measures”.

“There was some overcompensation on our part as we tune our system to deal with this scale of attack,” he continued. “In the past 24 hours, we've been contending with a variety of attacks that continue to change in nature and intensity.”

Stone also revealed that the attacks appear to have been “geopolitical in motivation”, but refused to speculate about where they might have originated or exactly why they were launched.

The site was taken down for several hours on Thursday afternoon after a DOS attack was launched against it and several other sites including social network Facebook.

Since then, Facebook chief security officer Max Kelly has said the attacks were aimed at silencing a single user – a pro-Georgian blogger. They are widely believed to have been launched by Russian-sponsored hackers.

“Denial of Service attacks are a known quantity on the web and they are not going away any time soon,” wrote Stone.

“Nevertheless, we can and will improve system response to these assaults such that they don't interfere with our normal, everyday Twittering.”

In other news, Twitter today notified users that its help pages will be unavailable during a planned downtime for database maintenance tomorrow morning. For two hours starting at 8.45am BST, users will be unable to make changes to account settings or access help pages, the firm said.