Twitter went down today because of a DDoS attack. Distributed Denial of Service attacks are requests that hit a server continulously until they overload the server. When a flood of requests comes to a website they bog down the server and mixed in with normal visitors, this usually causes the server to crash.
Most servers have switches to transfer, what appears to be legitimate traffic and I would think Twitter does too. But with the amount of traffic it looks like is hitting the server, it just can’t keep up.
While this post was to tell you what happened in simplified terms – I should have titled it, the day 1000s got their work completed.
Why Twitter was down – http://bit.ly/G7zby