WikiLeaks shut down by American hackers

WikiLeaks is down. The site has been down for the last five days, during which it has been experiencing a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This isn't the first time this has happened. Back in May, Wikileaks was also taken down by a DDoS attack. That one lasted four days, however, meaning this one has already gone on for longer, according to the site's Twitter account.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks is a popular method of over-flooding a Web server with traffic until, ideally, the site is crippled and can’t support any visitors. Activists have since mirrored WikiLeaks–hosted documents on other sites, but those too have been hit hard by AntiLeaks. By Thursday afternoon, the mirror at Cabledrum.net was still offline and external e-commerce sites launched to raise donations for WikiLeaks were ravaged by DDoS assaults as well.