An image of the WikiLeaks website, back online at a Swiss domain name
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The support of WikiLeaks’ service providers continues to wane, following a week during which efforts to take the site offline dominated the news – over the weekend, PayPal suspended the site’s donation button, and Monday there were reports that the site’s Swedish servers might be under attack.
(A lot of last week’s news concerning WikiLeaks is collected here, in our “weekend reading” feature.)
An ABC News report from Monday said the site’s Swedish servers, located at the facilities of hosting provider PRQ were unresponsive, possibly due to a denial of service attack. The site has been the target of a few such attacks since the release, last Sunday, of a collection of 250,000 secret US diplomatic communications.
It was reported as recently as a few weeks ago that WikiLeaks had left the Swedish host PRQ, but seems to have returned, according to these recent reports, and WikiLeaks’ own Twitter account. The organization posted on Twitter Monday that its servers at the company were “unresponsive,” and that it was investigating the cause.
The performance of the organization’s Swedish hosting provider does not appear to be affecting the performance of the site (which moved last week to a Swiss domain, wikileaks.ch). Another Monday post on Twitter said the site is “now hosted at 507 locations, planet wide.”
Attacks on the site’s servers are just one of the shut-down efforts WikiLeaks weathered in the last week, a period that saw the organization dropped as a customer by Amazon’s hosting service, as well as by its DNS provider, EveryDNS.
In a move that may prove more damaging to the organization, WikiLeaks was dropped over the weekend by PayPal, according to a variety of online reports.
PayPal, which had been powering the donation button on WikiLeaks for several years, said it had shut down the account because of violations of its acceptable use policy – pointing specifically to the section that says its payment service cannot be used for activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.
Following the news, WikiLeaks suggested that PayPal, which is owned by eBay had bowed to pressure from the US government in deciding to shut down the account. The group made similar suggestions last week about Amazon after it was removed from that company’s hosting service.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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