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Twitter goes down, users 'tweet' about it

Twitter A Web site and service that lets users send short text messages from their cellphones to a group of friends. Launched in 2006, Twitter (www.twitter.com) was designed for people to broadcast their current activities and thoughts.  went down on Thursday prompting devotees of the micro-blogging service to share how they coped without it.

"I WAS FORCED TO TEXT MSG MSG: see glutamic acid. ," lamented a user named "Misskette."

"I found a life," tweeted "JeremyTaylor09."

"I coped with my Twitter withdrawal by screaming what I was doing at the top of my lungs," said "MoL42."

"JPreister" said she "got more work done this afternoon than like ever."

The philosophical "PBHouse" mused: "If you tweet and Twitter is frozen does it make a sound?"

The political "Watchj" said: "I'm sure the Republicans will find some way to blame this on Obama."

Many Twitter users stopped receiving the 140-character-or-less messages known as "tweets" shortly before 11:00 am (1500 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) See UTC.

GMT - Universal Time 1
) and did not regain normal service until several hours later.

When "tweets" began to flow normally again, the top "trending topic" on Twitter was users telling others what they did "when Twitter was down."

The San Francisco-based company explained the disruption as a "bug" in one of the "core services The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter.
Please help [ improve the introduction] to meet Wikipedia's layout standards. You can discuss the issue on the talk page.
 that powers Twitter."

Twitter last month closed a deal for "significant" new financing despite having yet to show how it is going to make money.

It did not reveal the amount of the funding but The Wall Street Journal and The New York New York, state, United States
New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of
 Times put the figure at up to 100 million dollars and said it valued Twitter at one billion dollars.

Twitter has grown rapidly in popularity since it was launched in August 2006 and claims to have topped 50 million users.

Twitter last suffered a major disruption in August when it came under a distributed denial of service A condition in which a system can no longer respond to normal requests. See denial of service attack.  (DDoS) attack along with Facebook and other social networking sites A Web site that provides a virtual community for people interested in a particular subject or just to "hang out" together. Members create their own online "profile" with biographical data, pictures, likes, dislikes and any other information they choose to post. .

The accounts of a pro-Georgian blogger were identified as the target of the DDoS attacks believed to be an attempt to silence his online criticism of Moscow's role in last year's Georgia-Russia war.

Classic DDoS attacks involve legions of zombie computers, machines infected with viruses, which are commanded to simultaneously visit a website, overwhelming its servers.
Copyright 2009 AFP Global Edition
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
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Author:AFP
Publication:AFP Global Edition
Date:Oct 8, 2009
Words:333
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Twitter goes down, users 'tweet' about it

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