One unsuspecting Thursday morning, Twitter users found themselves unable to log in and send messages over their favorite mini-blogging site.
Any messages that did make it through were in connection to the slow Twitter responses and inquiries about what was wrong.
I myself logged through Tweetdeck and one of the first messages that went out from my account was "Is Twitter being slow for anyone else?"   This is how I was first informed that Twitter was a victim of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
What began at around 9am was reigned into control at around 11am with some users still experiencing problems later in the day as Twitter recovered from this attack.
  But it turns out Twitter wasn't the only social media sit hit that morning, although it may have been the hardest.
Facebook and LiveJournal also reported attacks on their sites and some service interruptions.
  These types of attacks are malicious attempts to render a site and its services unavailable to users.
DDoS attacks are sometimes also done on sites of online banks and credit card payment gateways.
In this type of attack, hackers direct a botnet, usually made of thousands of malware-infected PCs to a target site in an attempt to flood it with junk traffic so that regular users cannot gain access or have slow access.
  This is not the first breach of security for Twitter which has led them to launch a top-to-bottom investigation and possible overhaul of the security of their site.
User accounts and data were not harmed in this web attack.