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Twitter went down for a short time Saturday morning for reasons unknown.  They simply called it “unexpected downtime.”  In a blog post the company announced that once again they had to take their API offline as part of the repair process.  This frustrated many developers and users of third party services, many of which had already suffered disruption after the DDoS attack that hit Twitter hard last week.

“The first step our operations team must take will likely cause API downtime, especially affecting OAuth. We apologize for the inconvenience and we will work quickly to reduce the impact to the API. We appreciate your patience and I will update you as soon as we know more,” wrote Twitter representative named Doug Williams, from the company’s developer support team, in a discussion forum for Twitter developers.

Twitter’s most recent woes may be connected to a disturbing discovery made by a security researcher at Arbor Networks on Thursday-a botnet being run through the service.

“While digging around I found a botnet that uses Twitter as its command and control structure. Basically what it does is use the status messages to send out new links to contact, then these contain new commands or executables to download and run. It’s an infostealer operation,” wrote Jose Nazario.

This news should just add even more pressure on Twitter to come up with stronger and more effective security policies.  Their recent effort, which blocks malicious URLs was met with scorn when it was discovered the block can easily be gotten around by using an URL shortening service such as TinyURL or bit.ly.  Such services are pretty much a must on Twitter due to their insistence on restricting tweets to 140 characters.  Twitter is going to have to do better and fast.

Read [PCWorld]