Wikileaks has been under DDoS attack for the last three days
Summary: The Pirate Bay is down. Wikileaks is down. Visa was down. Are all these Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks a coincidence? Right now it's not clear, but something is definitely happening.
Context & Ripple Effects
WikiLeaks had already faced a distribution-layer squeeze in 2010, when a U.S. company withdrew its domain and the organization fought to stay reachable; the earlier domain withdrawal showed that access could be disrupted without taking down its reporting infrastructure.
The attack coincides with an unattributed assault on The Pirate Bay, while a separate report says that site returned and an Anonymous critic claimed responsibility. That overlap makes network availability—not attribution—the immediate common issue.
First-order effects
- WikiLeaks' public site is intermittently unavailable under the confirmed three-day DDoS attack, restricting access to its published material.
- The Pirate Bay's return separates its reported incident from WikiLeaks' continuing outage; the supplied coverage does not establish a common attacker or campaign.
Second-order effects
- WikiLeaks must again treat reachability as an operational vulnerability alongside domains and hosting, after its 2010 distribution disruptions.
- For readers and publishers, repeated attacks on high-profile sites make the resilience of delivery networks and alternate access paths more consequential than any single web address.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to online availability becoming a recurring pressure point for politically contentious publishers: disruption can be imposed at the network edge even when content remains intact.
- If attacks and intermediary withdrawals continue to be used against the same types of sites, resilience will depend increasingly on distributing access across providers rather than relying on a single domain or host.
The trend: Contentious online publishers are confronting a broader shift from disputes over what is published to attacks on the infrastructure that keeps it reachable.