As is well documented by now, today twitter was the subject of what seems to have been a “distributed denial of service” attack on its servers.

Result ? Apparently, London ground to a halt !

Not ! I say that in jest because it was also reported yesterday that London has more twitter users than any other city in the world !

But no – we all had to learn how to communicate ordinarily again. (Shock horror !) Well, I have only been twittering for a few weeks, so it wasn’t too hard to re-adjust. If you’re interested in a technical analysis, I recommend Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols excellent “cyber cynic” blog.

If you find it a bit heavy on the technical analysis, (and he does mention one or two conspiracy theories too), there is an important bottom line to his piece.

And that is that these DDoS attacks come from “botnets” set up on PCs, both domestic and commerical, that have been infected by viruses.

The moral of this story ? Make sure that your PC is regularly screened for nasty stuff like viruses and other malware.

Not only will you benefit, so will the rest of us ! At least those that “can’t live” without twitter