MSNBC.com, an Internet news site owned by software titan Microsoft and General Electric's NBC TV network, says its site went dark Thursday for about two hours, from 4:30 a.m. PST to 6:30 a.m. PST.
MSNBC said that although it's still investigating the incident, the outage may have been caused by a so-called syn attack. Such attacks occur when a hacker sends a flood of bogus service-connection requests to a network that clog it up so no one else can get online. "We isolated the incident and got the site back up as quickly as possible," said Peter Dorogoff, an MSNBC spokesman. "It's secure at this point."
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Discuss: Lights go out briefly at MSNBC.com
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