Which explains why Twitter has been slow enough today so as to leave me banging my head against the wall. If you’re not sure what a DDOS attack is, Wikipedia is your friend.

Apparently the attacks took Twitter down entirely for several hours this morning. The site’s weblog had this to say:

We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.

Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.

LiveJournal and Facebook were reportedly under attack, as well. Whether all of the sites were under coordinated attacks is unknown at this point, but it is a bit fishy that the attacks came at the same time.