EL PASO, Texas -- Frantic fingers froze Thursday for the social networking faithful, as micro-blogging site Twitter was the target of a massive hacker attack. And the glitch seemed to have an effect on El Paso Tweeters.

“I’d say I'm on about 10 to 15 times a day,” said Alberto Perez.

But Thursday, Perez went old school, reading a book at The Percolator in Downtown El Paso. He learned this morning about the Twitter takedown, which tech experts describe as a "denial of service attack".

"There are people who for whatever motives want to bring other people's companies and services to a halt," said Walt Mossberg, a personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

The hackers did it by ordering scores of computers to log on to the Twitter site, flooding it so legitimate users couldn't get through. For many, like Perez, it meant seeing an error message over and over again.

“I have a lot of news reports, blogs, just random information, just friends seeing what's going on,” he told KFOX.

But there were no updates on his phone today, no matter how many times he checked.

"Every half hour maybe,” he said. "I wish I had a tweet to tell me what actually happened."

Social networking site Facebook was also affected by the hackers Thursday. And as these sites increase in popularity, techies say something needs to be done.

"We need to make these things serious crimes,” said Mossberg. “I don't see it as any different than somebody going into a physical business and shooting it up or shutting it down or blocking access to it."

Though his phone sits idle, Perez isn't too bothered.

"I'm still in reality, luckily," he said.

But as soon as the tweets come chirping back, KFOX wondered whether he would ever read the last chapter of his book.

"I hope so,” he laughed. “But I might have so many backlogged tweets that I just have to read those for hours."

Both sites did come back by Thursday afternoon. You can follow KFOX on Twitter and Facebook by clicking on the links on this page.