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My first thought too. I immediately tried to load CIA and then thought, "Maybe they didn't hack it at all but just put out their Twitter message to drive traffic at it?"

Or more interestingly, if they were in the process of hacking or something and wanted the cover of a torrent of strangers trying to reach their site.

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I just happened to be looking at my Twitter feed the very moment they posted, and clicked the link immediately. No go.

Would this effect happen so quick? I guess they do have a lot of followers, but I'd hope that even if all of them did what I did they could survive that amount of hits?

The other thing to keep in mind is that cia.gov is probably not made to handle lots of traffic, since I cant imagine them having a massive day-to-day userbase.. hence I assume it would be rather easy to get them choked up with traffic

perhaps they were DDOSing it and brought it to a crawl, then all the other visitors streaming in would certainly give it the final blow

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