Twitter killed in worm attack

Security experts are sifting through message databases at micro-blogging provider Twitter following a devastating attack by the Conficker virus that has left thousands of people unable to access their Twitter accounts this morning.

Conficker has infected up to 35 million computers worldwide and activated its payload in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

"I don't know what happened," said one angry Twitter user. "One minute I sending tweets and the next minute everything just disappeared."

A source at Twitter, who didn't want to be named for fear of losing his parking space and doughnut privileges, told this reporter, "We'll have the service up and running again shortly but we have lost several million tweets. Fortunately, I don't think any of them were very important."

Twitter has seen phenomenal growth in the past 3 months, particularly in the UK, where thousands of people have been typing in the wrong address and visiting a UK-based website that was registered at least a year before the micro-blogging site.

"It jolly well serves them right," said the owner of twitter.co.uk. "I've tried to contact the people at Twitter.com to discuss the problems I'm having as a result of their popularity but so far I've had no reply. Perhaps this little April Fools Day prank of creating a fake BBC news report might get their attention."