Outages Hit WikiLeaks, Twitter, in Possible ‘DDoS Attack’

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange participates via video link at a news conference marking the 10th anniversary of the secrecy-spilling group in Berlin, on Oct. 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)

WikiLeaks claims that its servers have been under a “massive targeted DDoS attack” on early Monday morning.

“WikiLeaks servers are currently under a massive targeted DDoS attack after releasing #DNCLeak2. Keep us strong,” according to a Facebook message posted by the site, noting that it posted leaks taken from the Democratic National Committee.

A “DDoS attack” refers to Distributed Denial of Service attack is “an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources,” according to the Digital Attack Map. 

“They target a wide variety of important resources, from banks to news websites, and present a major challenge to making sure people can publish and access important information.”

However, it appears that WikiLeaks’ website was back online on Monday morning.

Meanwhile, ABC News reported that Twitter’s website went down briefly on Monday following WikiLeak’s message. Twitter hasn’t yet confirmed the outage.