According to Twitter’s status page, Twitter (now) says that it is/was under a denial of service attack (Wikipedia entry for Denial of Service Attack).

In a statement to CNN, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (Wikipedia entry for Biz Stone) said:

“There’s no indication that this attack is related to any previous activities. We are currently the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we defend and later investigate.”

Twitter now claims that the web site is now back up… however, somecanuckchick (still) cannot access Twitter, via the web site, TwitterFox, TwitterTools, etc.

In the meantime, here is a list of alternative things to do.

Update, from Twitter’s post regarding its recovery from the DoS attack:

“As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.”

Here are 20 common (and not-so-common!) twitterisms:

• twitterverse—Twitter+universe.
• twitosphere—Twitter+atmosphere.
• twaffic—Twitter+traffic.
• tweet—a post made to Twitter.
• tweeting—the act of posting to Twitter.
• retweet—a re-post of a tweet made by another to Twitter; often abbreviated to “RT”.
• retweeting—the act of re-posting a tweet made by another to Twitter.
• twoosh—the perfect tweet; a tweet which is exactly 140 characters in length, the character limit.
• mistweet—to tweet by mistake; often inappropriately, or incorrectly.
• tweepish—Twitter+sheepish.
• twitterrhea—the act of sending a large number of tweets over a short period of time.
• tweeple—Twitter+people.
• twitterness—contributions made to the twitosphere by tweeple.
• tweetup—Twitter+meetup.
• twitophant—one who repeatedly tweets, or retweets the [current] trending topics to gain more followers.
• twitterectomy—the act of culling the tweeple one follows.
• tweetaholic—someone who is addicted to Twitter.
• twitterfu—the measure of one’s level of skill using Twitter.
• tweetheart—Twitter+sweetheart.
• tweetard—Twitter+retard.

Of course, there are many more twitterisms…

Do you have a favourite twitterism, or new twitterism? Let somecanuckchick know!