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On Thursday, Twitter was taken down by a denial-of-service attack, while Facebook suffered related problems. And other social/media sites like Gawker and Live Journal were hampered by attacks as well.

A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google’s Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial-of-service attack that led to the sitewide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook chief security officer, Max Kelly.

“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” Max Kelly told CNET News.

A blogger believed to be the target of the attack that brought down Twitter Thursday has told CNN the cyber assault was politically motivated and timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Russia-Georgia conflict.

“Cyxymu” has identified himself to CNN as “George,” and the owner of the Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal accounts named by Facebook’s security officer as being the target of a coordinated online attack.

George told CNN in an e-mail his username is “the name of my home town, the capital of Abkhazia (Sokhum) written in Russian and typed in Latin letters.”

He confirmed he is 34 years old and based in Tbilisi, Georgia, but declined to give further information which may reveal his identity.

Cyxymu has long been viewed as an antagonist by some Russian supporters, who take issue with the blogger’s coverage of recent military conflicts in Georgia.

The micro-blogging site Twitter, used by several million people in Britain, was overwhelmed by the attack. Facebook, which has more than 250 million users worldwide, and Google — because of a YouTube account associated with Cyxymu — were targeted but were not badly affected.

Google said: “Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services. We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack.”
It emerged that hackers also used a botnet to send a flurry of spam e-mail messages that contained links to pages on Twitter, Facebook and other sites written by Cyxymu.