Was Twitter hacked?

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Twitter’s ‘fail whale’ logo

Twitter went down on Thursday for an hour and 40 minutes — enough time to cause anxiety, depression and withdrawal symptoms among its 400 million users.

It has been reported that there were two separate outages, combining to form the website’s longest service disruption ever.
Twitter were quiet about it and didn’t even post their famous ‘fail whale’ error message. Instead, the website simply timed out and failed to load.
For the next one hour, one of the loudest areas on the internet, went silent.
Twitter’s PR then explained that a ‘bug’ had caused the massive crash and that the social network had to rollback to a previous version to start again. This statement was not an explanation, but more of a response. A response to what?
The UG Nazi?
The world’s newest hacker group is claiming that it was one of their attacks that kicked Twitter in the servers. And that it was a girl!
We found a post by one of the group’s hackers, Cosmos.
“It wasn’t really difficult at all, I myself honestly thought Twitter would be more protected from a DDoS Attack, but I guess not,” she wrote.
DDoS refers to denial of service. It also means you should go get your prayer book.
Twitter’s disaster response team (formed overnight, obviously) have declined to confirm whether the ‘bug’ was malicious in nature — adding to confusion.
“This is crazy. Aren’t some of the world’s most unstable politicians also on Twitter? A hack could easily gain access to an account and fire off an offensive tweet. Then, just wait for World War 3 to happen,” says Srikant, Twitter user, a fan of action movies and frankly, a bit paranoid.
But is it that easy to ‘down the bird’?
“I don’t think so. Twitter are serious people. Also, it protects quiet a bit of relevant information today — from earthquake alerts to disease. If there’s a problem, Twitter must fix it immediately,” believes Ranjith, who is trying to think of ways to let friends know it’s really him.
These are testing times for the social network, which is yet to make any real money out of 400 million tweets being shot off every day. A hack attack is the last thing they need.
And yes, about the UG Nazi? The last time these guys were near a keyboard, the CIA’s website went down. Rumours claim this new clan is affiliated with LulzSec — and that one fact is just about enough to convince anybody — to get a bigger door.