Twitter back after sustained outage

By CHRISTIAN BOONE

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It would’ve been the talk of Twitter, had people been able to tweet.

For three hours Thursday morning the social networking giant went dark, downed by hackers. A minor inconvenience for most users – the kind who feel compelled to tell the world what they ate for breakfast.

“Man...twitter keeps going in and out for me...this can be problematic tonight during Real Housewives of Atlanta!” wrote jamaaLondon before the problem was repaired.

But for others, Twitter’s outage put a crimp in their daily routine. It was the electronic equivalent of a flat tire.

“It affected me somewhat,” said Gainesville Realtor Kim Craft. “I use Twitter in my business to stay in contact with some of my clients. My younger clients communicate through Facebook, Twitter and text messaging more than simple phone calls.”

Author and stay-at-home mom Laurel Snyder, aka @laurelsnyder, said Twitter is “the best way for me to be in contact with the world.”

Snyder is also using Twitter, which enables members to communicate using short text messages up to 140 characters in length, to promote the AJC Decatur Book Festival, scheduled for Labor Day weekend.

“There’s nothing I could do without it,” she said. “That’s the embarrassing part. I felt like I might as well watch TV.”

Twitter said in its status blog Thursday that it was “defending against a denial-of-service attack,” in which hackers command scores of computers to a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through.

Expect more disturbances in the future, according to Kimberly Turner, co-founder of the Decatur-based aggregator Regator.com.

“They’ve grown so rapidly it’s hard to keep the infrastructure in line with the demand,” she said. “They’re kind of an easy target right now.”

Twitter, now has more than 30 million users, up from less than 2 million a little over a year ago, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Facebook also suffered intermittent outages Thursday, due largely to increased traffic following the Twitter shutdown, which occurred around 9 a.m.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.