Social media site, Twitter, has been the subject of a distributed denial-of-service attack, causing it's servers to overload.
Twitter users found that they could not access the site and were not even presented with the site's 'fail whale', which normally greets visitors when there is a problem with twitter. Twitter described the event as a "single, massively coordinated attack".
A distributed denial-of-service attack works by making thousands infected computers attempt to access a site's server. This causes the server to overload and means that legitimate users cannot view the site.
Twitter's official blog said "This activity is about saturating a service with so many requests that it cannot respond to legitimate requests thereby denying service to intended customers or users."
Twitter says "Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services" but stressed "no user data was compromised in this attack."
The site's blog says "We've worked hard to achieve technical stability" but "today's massive, globally distributed attack was a reminder that there's still lots of work ahead."
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