Wikileaks taken offline as more cables released
By Ian Dunt
The whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has been taken offline, after its domain company pulled out.
The move comes after an intense week saw Julian Assange’s website publish hundreds of thousands of classified documents revealing America’s diplomatic relationships with the world.
A variety of pressures have impacted on the site as it regularly published the thoughts of US ambassadors and diplomatic staff around the world.
In Sweden a warrant was issued for Mr Assange’s arrest on rape charges and for other sexual offences. British police are understood to be prepared to arrest him, after the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) was issued with a warrant from Gothenburg.
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On the international stage, the attacks on Mr Assange from leading political commentators in the US have been extremely hostile, with secretary of state Hillary Clinton saying the leaks were an attack on the international community and some right-wing figures calling for his assassination.
Meanwhile, a series of cyber attacks have been conducted in a desperate attempt to take the site offline.
EveryDNS.net, the domain provider used by Wikileaks, said it had terminated services with the website due to the cyber attack.
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“WikiLeaks.org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks KEEP US STRONG,” the website tweeted.
The company claimed the scale of the attacks threatened their services to other websites.
“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.”
Wikileaks turned to online shop Amazon to host the site, but the company ended the agreement earlier in the week.
Minutes after going down, the site re-emerged online, with a Swiss domain name.
The move comes as Wikileaks released cables revealing American and Afghan irritation at British military performance in Helmand and that the Obama administration was dismissive of many of Gordon Brown’s efforts to secure an international financial transactions tax.
