Attacks bring down Twitter and Facebook - washingtonpost.com

What happened Thursday, in 140 characters: Twitter went down. Facebook went down. People panicked, unused to not oversharing minutiae of life. Twitter back up. Facebook back up. Phew.

At 9 a.m., millions of users of Twitter.com found themselves unable to access the microblogging Web site, the modern version of the telephone party line through which more than 40 million people announce what they are doing, reading, eating and thinking at any given moment. Twitter has been used for on-the-ground reports from protests in Tehran and, more recently, by Paula Abdul, who announced her resignation from "American Idol" via her Twitter feed...