If you happen to experience a down time from Twitter and Facebook last Thursday, August 6, 2009, then this is the primary cause – DDoS attack!
The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack targeted Twitter to make it unavailable to certain users or customers. DDoS is a malicious effort commonly used to disrupt services in online banks, credit card payment gateways and other money-oriented online sites.
Twitter has grown a lot in years and is now currently used for marketing purposes. The DDoS attack may have certain purpose that reports say that are still in investigation for the real intention. Its Facebook attack also says that the intention merely wanted to stop the current service for particular users of the site.
Up to now, both Twitter and Facebook were able to normalize the sites after hours of being down but were continuously in search for the intention of the DDoS attack for it not to happen again.