Hacked: Twitter & LiveJournal, Maybe Facebook too

Twitter and LiveJournal fell prey to hackers this morning, but appear to be operational as of this post. Twitter claims that they were taken down by a DOS (denial of service) attack. A DOS attack overloads a server with excess traffic to the point that the server loses the ability to process incoming requests. DOS attacks require the concerted action of many individual computers, and often are accomplished by utilizing individual computers, often ones exploited with some sort of trojan horse or other malicious exploit, to contact the intended target repeatedly until the attack is successful.

This past weekend, consumerist.com was taken down by a similar attack. Facebook confirmed that they experienced internal network issues this morning, but did not address whether or not they had been hacked.

Source: CNBC