Hackers on Thursday shut down the fast-growing messaging service Twitter for hours, while Facebook experienced intermittent access problems.

According to Yahoo News, This attacks may have been related to the ongoing political conflict between Russia and Georgia.

They started with hackers using a botnet to send a flurry of spam e-mail messages that contained links to pages on Twitter, Facebook and other sites written by a single pro-Abkhazia activist, according to Bill Woodcock, research director of the San Francisco-based Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit that tracks Internet traffic. Although the problem only took few hours to solve (approximately 1 hour according to Twitter Status Page) it caused quite some hassle to Twitter dependent individuals – how do you find out that Twitter has been hacked when you can’t access it?