The NSA Website Is Down

The National Security Agency's website, nsa.gov, has been down the better part of the afternoon, and people are saying it's the work of the collective of controversial hackers known only as "Anonymous."

Any association with Anonymous is at this point, purely speculative, but Twitter is abuzz with theories that the site was the subject of a targeted attack.

Gizmodo reports that the site is suffering from a distrubuted denial of service, when hackers overtake a of slave computers to overload the server.

The site went down shortly after 3 p.m., and at the time of this post still was not back up.

Brian Fung, the tech reporter for the Washington Post, tweeted that he spoke with an NSA spokesperson, who said that they were looking into the outage, but refused to say if it was the result of a cyber attack.

As Gizmodo points out, it's not wholly clear that Anonymous is behind the attack, or that the NSA's website was attacked at all. And the fact that it took at least an hour for people to start linking the outage to anonymous is a little suspicious.

Anonymous tacitly acknowledged some level of involvement on Twitter.

Aww don't panic about http://t.co/BCCEvVEoQL being down. They have a backup copy of the internet.

- Anonymous (@AnonyOps) October 25, 2013