Second attack takes down Twitter

Twitter has not given an explanation for the attack

A distributed denial of service attack has taken down Twitter for the second time in a week.

While the attack only stopped services for about half an hour, the outage is still a concern and will only heighten fears that the service is under-investing in its security systems. Twitter gave no explanation for the attack in a blog posting.

“We’re working to recover from a site outage and will update as we learn more,” it said.

“Update (12:17p): We’re back up and analyzing the traffic data to determine the nature of this attack.”

The first attack is now thought to have been the work of Russian hackers looking to silence a pro-Georgian commentator. Since the outbreak of hostilities between the two countries there have been continued online attacks.

Graham Cluley, senior technology correspondent at Sophos, said: “The good news is that, unlike last week's attacks, Twitter was back up-and-running in about half-an-hour. So kudos to them for managing to avoid too much disruption for millions of their users.

“However, commentators will be wondering if this is a similar attack to the one conducted last week (in other words, a return to political hackers taking their revenge on a Georgian blogger with views they don't like) or a copycat who heard how easy it was to bring down Twitter, and thought it might be "cool" to try it for themselves.”