n#whentwitterwasdown I didn’t have anything better to do but to keep refreshing the page. Without Twitter it’s so BORING!

nRolled up in fetal position and rocked back and forth #whentwitterwasdown

n#whentwitterwasdown Facebook was down too. My life was almost over

Despondency swept through the Twitter and Facebook-fixated world on Thursday when both services — along with search lifeline Google — didn’t function or were infuriatingly slow for hours after a hacker attack.

The official Twitter blog called the “DoS” despair — that’s short for “denial of service”— the result of a “single, massively coordinated attack”. The problem may have been combated by Thursday night but the world’s — and Calcutta’s — fleet-fingered Netizens needed a whole lot of comforting throughout Friday.

Twitter was flooded with messages detailing user despair. A city-based Twitterer, Poptate, wrote: “#whentwitterwasdown i went twang twang twang on my guitar.”

With Facebook being down at the same time, it seemed to be the end of the world for some. “Most of the Internet is screwed up... Kabhi Twitter is giving 404s (the standard file or page not found error message).. to kabhi Linkedin.. to kabhi Facebook,” tweeted Mitesh Ashar.

So what did Calcutta do when they couldn’t tweet?

Some ended up working harder than they normally would. “I am generally on Twitter all day, so it was quite irritating,” fumed designer Kallol Datta. “I ended up smoking more, and then finally gave up and got some work done. I kept getting texts from other friends saying that Twitter was down.”

Shane Ireland, 35, missed more than one Web appointment.

“A couple of friends of mine have this daily session of Facebook poker that I had to miss. I was trying to tag people and I couldn’t do it. Plus a friend from Canada is online at a specific time, and we couldn’t chat,” bemoaned Ireland, who is on Facebook from 8am to 1am on a regular day.

Not everyone noticed the crash, of course. “I was busy shooting for a reality show. My iPhone had gone for repairs, so I wasn’t checking the Web there either,” said percussionist Bickram Ghosh.

Fellow Facebook regular, actress Parno Mittra, also missed the cyber mayhem. “When was it? Oh! I was working then,” she shrugged.

It took the crash for one Twitterer to realise that there was more to life than networking on the Net. “#whentwitterwasdown i realised i had a life. seriously, get over it.”