Thaindian News

The social networking world was thrown into turmoil today with Twitter taken totally down by a reported DDoS attack and Facebook restricted to limited service.

The microblogging twitter network was taken offline at about 6am PDT (1pm UCT) in what the company later said was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

After briefly returning to service after more than two-and-a-half hours of down-time, the Twitter was again brought down - this time in a harder fashion.

While some Twitter tools such as Seesmic Desktop continued to work during the first outage, after it’s temporary return to service it joined the ranks of TweetDeck and also failed to operate.

At the same time, social networking site Facebook also reported difficulties, with some users not be able to logon and others not being able to post updates or wall comments.

Natalie Standefer in Jakarta, Indonesia said she was able to logon to her Facebook page but trying to update wall posts or her status resulted in a transport error message.

Standefer said she had been experiencing a transport error message for the last two weeks while using Facebook, but her Hi5 account worked fine. “Hi5 is its normal speedy and reliable self but Facebook is the pits,” she said.

On it’s status site Twitter said the company was continuing to defend itself against a DDoS attack and would investigate it’s origins once the attack was over.

Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said the company was looking into the problems the site was experiencing and would have an update “as soon as possible”.