A single blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google's Blogger and YouTube was responsible for a denial of service attack that led to the site-wide outage at the social notworking site.

According to a Facebook executive the blogger was pro-Georgian and uses the account name "Cyxymu," the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia in the former Soviet Union. It seems that Cyxymu angered a few Russian nationalists who decided to shut him down completely. All accounts at those sites were attacked at the same time.

Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News that it was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. He was hoping that he could find the source of the attacks and take action against them. Twitter was down for several hours beginning early Thursday morning, and suffered periodic slowness and time-outs throughout the day.

A cached version Cyxymu's blog site blamed the denial of service (DOS) attacks on his accounts on the US-based sites. "Now it's obvious it's a special attack against me and Georgians.” Spam e-mail attacks were also launched in his name.

Facebook and Google were able to minimize any impact to their sites. Facebook even managed to keep the Cyxymu account accessible to Web surfers from that region, Kelly said.