Both GigaOm and TechCrunch recieved reports from numerous readers that Twitter had not only gone down, but had been hacked. TechCrunch posted the broken-English message that appeared in place of Twitter's homepage that reads, in part, "U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….[sic]". TechCrunch notes that at least one other Web site has been defaced with the same message.

This isn't the first time Twitter has had issues with security. Over the summer, hackers obtained internal documents regarding Twitter's future plans, and turned them over to TechCrunch. In a controversial move, TechCrunch went public with some of the information it received.

As of this writing, three of the top ten trending topics on Twitter relate to the outage and hack. Me? I noticed the outage around 10:30 PM Pacific time tonight, assuming it was just another Twitter outage. It was only when I was finally able to log in to Twitter that I realized what had happened.

Update Dec. 17 11:48 PM PST: Twitter now reports the following: "Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon."