In what has been termed as a "pretty heavy attack," the Thursday morning 'denial-of-service' (DoS) attack overwhelmed the popular social network, Twitter, thereby resulting in a nearly three-hour long disruption of access to more than 30 million of its users the world over! Also affected by the attacks were other social networks - Facebook, Live Journal, and Gawker.

Going by the information provided by Stephan Tanase, a senior analyst at Kaspersky Lab, while access to Twitter was restored in most parts of the US by 1 p. m. Eastern, the service was not accessible via iPhone or in Eastern Europe for a large part of the day!

Since inaccessibility of Twitter meant no 'tweeting' with friends and colleagues, the situation was further aggravated by botnets - countless infected home and workplace PCs - that flooded the websites with infuriating requests.

Commenting on the magnitude of the Dos attack, Roger Thompson, a senior researcher at AVG, said that possibly a vigilante tried to "get the attention of the world on the botnet problem."

Though a LinkedIn Research Network/Harris poll has revealed that almost 70 percent of the 2,025 adults surveyed were ignorant about Twitter, it is habitually used by passionate 'Twitterers' to follow breaking news and share ideas. While a few companies use tweets for providing customer service; some celebrities use it as a marketing tool for their followers!