The National Security Agency's website has been down for over 10 hours now, though officials have refused to comment on whether it was hacked or not.
This doesn't seem to be a good year for the United States. Earlier this week, several reports claimed that The National Security Agency (NSA) had contact information for 35 unnamed world leaders, which it shared with other entities in the U.S. government. Following the report, the agency's website has been down for the past ten hours.
Many people on Twitter claim that this could be the hacker group Anonymous' doing. But considering the group's decentralization, responsibility claims from this group aren't always very accurate.
Dear National Security Agency #NSA, Lesson #1 : If you spy on us, we are coming for you! #Anonymous pic.twitter.com/sofVYnIIf5
- An0nPun1shm3nt 404 (@An0nPun1shm3nt) October 25, 2013
Aww don't panic about https://t.co/BCCEvVEoQL being down. They have a backup copy of the internet. - Anonymous (@AnonyOps) October 25, 2013
https://t.co/putsF3RjmV website has been down for the last couple of hours. I can't find anyone claiming it or... https://t.co/rQnW9eetCJ
- r/conspiracy (@rconspiracy) October 25, 2013
Nevertheless, several tweets were sent claiming Anonymous has a hand in the website's shutdown. Some officials even speculated that this could be the consequence of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaking information about NSA's spying program.
"Today, no telephone in America makes a call without leaving a record with the NSA. Today, no internet transaction enters or leaves America without passing through the NSA's hands," Snowden said in a statement to American Civil Liberties Union, Thursday.
In a recent statement issued by the NSA, the agency revealed that the outage was caused by a blip during a scheduled site update.
"NSA.gov was not accessible for several hours tonight because of an internal error that occurred during a scheduled update. The issue will be resolved this evening. Claims that the outage was caused by a distributed denial of service attack are not true," the statement read, cited by CNET.
Though a denial-of-service attack is being held responsible for the shutdown, the exact reason for the outage remains unclear.
