WikiLeaks says its been hacked, crashed pages include U.S. diplomatic cables

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WikiLeaks said its website is under a malicious attack online Tuesday morning, leaving major parts of the site unavailable to users.

The attacks follow the controversial release of thousands of pages of U.S. diplomatic documents on the website based in Sweden, which posts secret government documents from anonymous sources.

The most recent release has left the U.S. government scrambling to contain the damage done in exposing secrets detailing negotiations between world leaders, some of their fears and a bit of gossip as well. (The Times has collected all of its WikiLeaks coverage here.)

As of about 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, the WikiLeaks homepage was viewable, but other pages such as ‘Cable Gate,’ where the site posted its controversial U.S. diplomatic cables Sunday, and ‘War Logs,’ which had government documents pertaining to the Iraq War, were unavailable.

A statement on WikiLeaks’ Twitter account said it was being hit with a distributed denial of service attack, a tactic hackers use to crash websites.

Officials at the website then sent out another tweet saying that the hackers were exceeding 10 gigabits per second, which is a large-scale attack.

The attack isn’t the first on the website. WikiLeaks said it was hacked on Sunday as well.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles