Twitter still reeling from attacks

Twitter has admitted it’s yet to fully recover from the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks which rocked the popular micro-bogging site last week.

In a blog posting yesterday, co-founder of the site Biz Stone said the firm was still working on restoring “access to apps built on the Twitter platform that were affected by defensive measures”.

“There was some overcompensation on our part as we tune our system to deal with this scale of attack,” he continued. “In the past 24 hours, we've been contending with a variety of attacks that continue to change in nature and intensity.”

Stone also revealed that the attacks appear to have been “geopolitical in motivation”, but refused to speculate about where they might have originated or exactly why they were launched.

The site was taken down for several hours on Thursday evening (AEST) after a DDoS attack was launched against it and several other sites including social network Facebook.

Since then, Facebook chief security officer Max Kelly has said the attacks were aimed at silencing a single user – a pro-Georgian blogger . They are widely believed to have been launched by Russian-sponsored hackers.

“Denial of Service attacks are a known quantity on the web and they are not going away any time soon,” wrote Stone.

“Nevertheless, we can and will improve system response to these assaults such that they don't interfere with our normal, everyday Twittering.”