Twitter down due to Denial-of-Service Attack

Twitter is currently under a Denial-of-Service attack according to their status page:

We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.

From what I can see you can sometimes access the site, but it’s really slow. And that’s one of the “symptoms” from a denial-of-service attack. Could this be a result of the Defcon hacker convention?

A denial-of-service attack is caused by a hackers that’s overloading a server infrastructure with so much data that the servers get extremely slow, or even crash. One way could be to do like the case when Digital Points got overloaded with spam in their forum some time ago.