(Photo credit: Twitter/UG)

A hacker who claims ties to the Underground Nazi Hacktivist Group (UGNazi) says the collective is responsible for yesterday's Twitter outage. The hacker, who goes by the handle Cosmos, told the Telegraph she was surprised how easy it was to take down the service. 

“It wasn't really difficult at all, I myself honestly thought Twitter would be more protected from a DDoS Attack, but I guess not,” she said.

Twitter denied the outage was the result of an attack, referring back to its cascaded bug explanation. According to the group's Twitter handle, UGNazi is based in New York City. In the past, the group has been affiliated with LulzSec.

Cosmos offered differing motives for the attack to various press outlets. In an email to SearchSecurity.com, she claimed it was in protest of Twitter’s support for the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which calls for sharing network traffic information and data about cybersecurity threats between the U.S. authorities and private companies.

However, Cosmos claimed fewer political aspirations in her conversation with the Telegraph, telling the paper:

“The attack was mainly for the ‘lulz’, it goes to show what we are capable of.”

So, which is it? Because if you ask us, the outage was about as amusing as UGNazi's Twitter avatar, which is to say not at all.

Screengrab from the ever-useful downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Twitter, everyone's favorite methadone drip of 140-character news and quips, has been down and unresponsive for the past hour. According to their Status Blog, engineers are aware of the unnamed "issue" and working to get things back up and running. (Hilariously, there's also a notation on the we're-fixing-it post that shows that the post has been tweeted out about 63 times.) As The Verge points out, you can still access Twitter through the mobile interface, though that seems slow to the point of unusable too.

We asked a few notorious Twitterphiles how they were dealing with the disappearance of their main communication mechanism. Joe Wiesenthal (@TheStalwart), Business Insider's resident Twitter addict, responded that he resorted to "Experimenting with Google +," Google's attempt at a relevant social network. New York Times media reporter and suspected Twitter robot Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) fell back on ancient technology: "Making phone calls." Reuters social media guru Anthony DeRosa, better known as @antderosa, seemed poised to rediscover a simpler time before Twitter when asked how he was coping: "I'm learning about this hot new social network called LIFE."

[Update 1:27 pm: There's no official update, but the stream of incoming tweets in TweetDeck seems to indicate that Twitter is back up and running. Phew!]

[Update 1:50pm: Back down! Still no official word, but TweetDeck has gone still and silent and downforeveryoneorjustme.com is confirming that it's everyone, not just me. Callie Schweitzer (@cschweitz) from Talking Points Memo, puts its succinctly: "It's literally like the world freezes."]

[Update 4:31pm: And it looks like we're finally, safely, and steadily back. Twitter engineers blame the outage on a "cascading bug," and seem to have everything under control.]