Iran Hacks Twitter

Angry over the use of Twitter to spread dissent, last night pro-government hackers in Iran brought the service down.

Those who tried to access Twitter were redirected to a site that had a green flag and proclaimed "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army." The Web site was down for nearly an hour. Representatives from Twitter could not be immediately reached for comment, but the company spoke about the issue on its official Twitter page. "Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We will update with more information soon," the company posted at about 2:30 a.m. ET Friday. It was unclear who the group Iranian Cyber Army was and if it is connected to Iran. However, Twitter has had an interesting relationship with Iran. Earlier this summer when Iran's disputed presidential election spiraled into bloody protests, the opposition took to social networking and used Twitter to inform the world. Protesters beamed images from the violent protests at a time when the mainstream media outlets had a hard time getting access to Iran.

Earlier this year the U.S. State Department convinced Twitter to delay a planned maintenance interruption so that protesters of Iran's rigged election could get their messages out.