Popular microblogging service Twitter went down for several hours on Thursday as hackers claiming to represent the "Iranian Cyber Army" disrupted the site's DNS records and replaced the front page graphics with angry anti-American sentiments presented in broken English.
The New York Times reports that, although Twitter has had a better record in recent months, its website used to be a byword for unscheduled downtime and an inability to cope with botnets and cyber attack. A DDoS attack this summer, which targeted Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and YouTube, succeeded in bringing down only Twitter as the other sites weathered the attack, according to the Times.
According to CNET, Twitter has had a troubled relationship with Iran, which objected to the microblogging service's State Department-sponsored postponement of scheduled downtime to better allow opposition figures to use the service for communication in the wake of the summer's controversial presidential election in that country.
The previous large-scale attack was also thought to be politically motivated, and targeted a blogger that expressed support for Georgia in its brief war with Russia.