The tweets are flying again, but that was not the case Thursday morning when Twitter fell victim to a hacker attack.

The outage began around 9 and lasted a few hours.

The outage affected one local man who said he depends on Twitter to make a living.

Chances are good Ryan Thompson tweets more than you. That's because it's his job.

What happened when he couldn't get on Twitter this morning?

"I was panicking," Thompson said.

Thompson works for the Dalton Agency, a local PR firm.

To a lot of his clients, Twitter isn't fun, it's business.

"Just trying to monitor what's going on with our clients," Thompson said. "There's a lot of interest and a lot of value knowing what the general public thinks about clients of ours. Being in touch with Twitter let's us keep a constant pulse and beat in terms of what everybody else is saying."

Tweets were one of the only ways the world learned about the violent crackdown on election protestors in Iran.

In fact, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Twitter serves a very valuable service.

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"The use of Twitter is a very important one not only to the Iranian people, but also now to people around the world," Clinton said.

On a less serious note, guess how most people found out that Paula Abdul wasn't coming back to American Idol: on Twitter.

For hundreds of thousands of people, tweeting is something they do every hour.

"It's really nice to be able to see what they're doing so you don't have to call them and figure out what they're doing," said Zack Osford, who uses Twitter. "It's also nice to see what's going on with your favorite sports teams or your favorite celebrity."

When one woman found out about the Twitter outage, she started worrying about her mom.

"My mom uses it for business," Jana Lambert said. "She communicates on it all day long."