WikiLeaks goes offline

The website of whistle-blowing organisation Wikileaks has been shut down by the company providing it with domain name services. EveryDNS.net said it had terminated services because Wikileaks.org had come under massive cyber attacks.

It said the attacks threatened its infrastructure and endangered access to thousands of other websites. Wikileaks says it has faced disruption since it began publishing thousands of secret US diplomatic cables.

The memos, which discuss US diplomatic relations and military activities, have been causing controversy across the world.

In a post on Twitter, Wikileaks acknowledged that its domain had been "killed" by EveryDNS.net. It was not clear how long disruption to the site would last for.

In a statement on its website, EveryDNS.net said it had issued a 24-hour termination notice to Wikileaks which ended at 0300 GMT on 2 December. It said the domain wikileaks.org had become the target of "multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks".

"These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites," it said.

"Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider," it added.

Wikileaks says its website has been under attack since it began publishing more than 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables. It turned to the online store Amazon to host its site but the company ended the agreement on Wednesday - a move welcomed by US officials. Wikileaks said its site is now being hosted by servers in Europe.


/BBC/