Sunday, just as 250,000 leaked US diplomatic despatches were being
made public, but news media sites carrying edited versions of the
cables remained operational.
The www.wikileaks.org domain was brought down by a method known as
distributed denial of service (DDoS), in which a huge number of
computers repeatedly demand web pages from the server, shutting out
ordinary human users and causing the server to jam.
There was no indication on Sunday who might have mounted the attack.
On the social network Twitter, WikiLeaks announced, 'We are currently
under a mass distributed denial of service attack.'
Media which had advance access to the cables offered many of them via
their own websites. The publishing consortium included the Der Spiegel
of Germany, The New York Times, the London newspaper The Guardian and
El Pais of Madrid.
Julian Assange, the Australian who founded WikiLeaks, meanwhile
defended the release.
Speaking on al-Jazeera television, he said the cables told the
'diplomatic history' of global affairs and said, 'No single individual
has even come to harm as a result of anything that we have ever
published.'
The TV channel said he was speaking to its reporters in Jordan by
video link from an undisclosed location on Sunday.
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