Well, I think everyone knows Twitter got hammered by the hackers again Thursday. If you are a Twitter user like me, you knew something was wrong when you couldn't log on. My first thought was that their servers were overwhelmed by the explosive growth they've been experiencing lately.

As it turns out, it was a DDoS "Direct Denial of Service" attack. It appears the outage was short lived but very disruptive. It comes at a time when Twitter is setting new records for attracting unique visitors to the popular messaging site. In June they reached over 40 million unique visitors, now that's a lot of traffic.

Twitter was not the only social networking site affected by the attack. It seems Facebook also showed some major slowing during the same time period. LiveJournal, a popular blogging site, also reported an attack lasting about an hour at about the same time. Coincidence? Google doesn't think so. Google has responded to the attack by assisting in the investigation of the outage.

The security systems Google has in place, prevented a more serious impact to Google related websites. Will they share their security expertise with the tweeting upstarts? I think so, Google has a huge investment in the overall security of the internet. Security experts have been concerned that simultaneous multi-site attacks may become more commonplace in the future. It's time to take a stand against it right now! The good news is, Twitter is back up and has resumed fielding our 140-character messages. What's your opinion? leave a comment.