Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal Back Up and Running After Attacks

Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal are back up after being felled earlier this morning by denial-of-service attacks that rendered them inaccessible. It’s not yet known if the attacks were related, although, as a LiveJournal spokesperson notes, “it would be a huge coincidence” if they weren’t.

Twitter went down around 6:30 am PDT and was live once again by 8:30 am PDT, but remains under attack.

“We are currently the target of a denial of service attack,” said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. “Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we defend and later investigate.”

Interestingly, Twitter wasn’t the only social media service targeted in this attack. Facebook and LiveJournal were hit as well. “Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users,” the company said in a statement. “No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users. We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”

Said a LiveJournal spokesperson, “While we can’t be 100 percent sure it was the same attack as on Twitter, Facebook, et al., it would be a huge coincidence if they aren’t tied to one another.” As of this writing, the site was back up and running.