Micro-blogging service Twitter was taken offline for more than two hours on Thursday in what the company believes was a co-ordinated attack.
The popular site has been subject to a so-called denial-of-service attack, according to the firm's official blog.
Denial-of-service (DOS) attacks take various forms but often involve a company's servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.
Facebook has also said it was subject to a similar attack.
DDoS my arse! It was that last smiley that did it! 
he kept that one quiet .
Sorry was trying out some new scripts and tweeting at the same time. One thing lead to another. 