Twitter's servers were on the fritz again on Tuesday, with members receiving server timeouts and third-party applications unable to access the microblogging service. This appears to have begun around 11:45 a.m. PDT.
Twitter posted an update to its status blog when the servers had been in flux for about 10 minutes: "Responding to site downtime. We're working to recover from a site outage and will update as we learn more."
The service was back up about a half hour later. At 12:17 p.m. PT, Twitter confirmed that it was an attack. "We're back up and analyzing the traffic data to determine the nature of this attack," the company said.
Outages used to be commonplace at Twitter when the small start-up's servers were unable to keep up with the massive amount of data flowing through them. They gradually became less and less frequent. But this one's particularly notable because it happens as Twitter is still reeling from a denial-of-service attack last week that targeted a Georgian activist blogger but ended up knocking Twitter's servers offline for several hours. Other services, like Facebook and LiveJournal, were also affected by the attack.
This article was first published as a blog post in CNET News.
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