San Francisco: Twitter and Facebook, two of the Web's hottest hangouts, suffered service problems on Thursday, raising speculation that they had come under a pre-planned coordinated attack by hackers.
Facebook members saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles. The social networking site is working with Twitter and Google Inc to determine whether there was foul play, a person familiar with the company said.
- Facebook says had network issues Thursday morning that resulted in "degraded site experience" for some users.
- Facebook says no user data was at risk and matter is now resolved for a majority of users.
- Facebook says it is monitoring situation to ensure users continue to be able to access the site.
- Facebook investigating potential foul play at this time.
SOCIAL MEDIA, ANTISOCIAL ATTACKS
Twitter's newfound fame makes it an easy target for hackers, said Steve Gibson, the president of Internet security research firm Gibson Research Corp.
Twitter, which lets users publish short, 140-character messages to groups of online "followers," is one of the fastest-growing Internet companies.
The number of worldwide unique visitors to the Twitter website reached 44.5 million in June, up 15-fold year-over- year, according to comScore data.
Denial-of-service attacks are "not different than any other attack, but it's going to very visible to a huge population of people who have now, to some degree, become dependent on this next-generation, real-time service," he said.
A single group could have been behind the problems on Twitter and Facebook as hackers evolve their ability to attack multiple sites at once, Gibson said.
"It seems a little too coincidental. They're like related services. They're similar. They're very popular," he said, but he pointed out it was just speculation so far.
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