TEXT OF STORY

Bill Radke: A hacker attack shut down Twitter this morning — just a couple of hours or so. Twitter said it was “defending against a denial-of-service attack” — which is when hackers command a whole bunch of computers to a single site at once. Tim Bahairn covers the tech industry as principal analyst at Creative Strategies. Tim, good morning.

Tim Bahairn: Good morning.

Radke: How did Twitterers respond to being disconnected?

Baharin:Well most of them were kind of going crazy, although I found a lot of them found were going over to Facebook and basically were launching their complaints that Twitter was down through their Facebook. So you know you do have alternatives.

Radke: OK. So besides a Twitter twitch, what’s really important about this being down for awhile?

Baharin: Yeah, the significance is that Twitter has become a very important way of communication that allows for one-to-one as well as one-to-many. So when it goes down, those that use this a lot for communicating with their friends, they feel kind of violated, like, hey wait, I can’t do anything.

Radke: What is the biggest business effect, if any, in an outage like this?

Baharin: Well, it’s a little hard to tell. Most of the true businesses that have used Twitter have not figured out a way to monetize it yet.

Radke: Well, airlines are selling tickets on Twitter. I mean it’s worked its way more into the business factor.

Baharin: Well it is. And again in those contexts the commercial business side obviously relies on it. At least from the standpoint of promotional.

Radke: Tim Baharin is principal analyst at Creative Strategies. Thanks.

Baharin: Thank you.