CYBER-THUGS: @Twitter we're clogging up ur tubes!

Twitter is under attack! The popular social media outlet that allows users to exchange 140-character messages is reportedly the victim of a denial-of-service attack. What the heck is that? (Three updates added.)

Denial-of-service is considered tactic of cyber-war where some one party uses a fleet of computers to flood a site with requests until the server overloads and has to reset. This can block common users and render the site inaccessible. This is Twitter's first major outage in three months.

No word yet on the source of the cyber attack -- is it North Korea? The Russians? Iran fighting back against the platform that broadcast the election uprising? But the site appears to be up and running, if slowly and inconsistently. More to come when we know more...

Update I: James Fallows tells me he's getting "connection interrupted" errors for the last two hours. The last tweet from Atlantic Business is getting that eternal spinning wheel, as of 1:15PM. On the bright side, I did just successfully follow Atlantic editor James Bennet.

Update II: Drat! At 1:18PM I timed out. Fallows says it's been happening to him all morning.

Update III: Was it Koobface? PC Mag points to a possible malicious software program that might have crashed Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal on Thursday.