Codebreaker

cia.gov goes down briefly

John Moe Jun 16, 2011

And that’s as much as we know for sure. The public facing site of the intelligence agency was down for a few hours yesterday around the same time that the suddenly inescapable LulzSec, the Lady Gaga of hacking groups, tweeted “Tango down – cia.gov – for the lulz”. What we don’t know is whether LulzSec led a DDOS attack on the site or whether something else happened and LulzSec became aware of the outage and tweeted it. It’s very possible that so many people went to check to see if it was down that the CIA was flooded with traffic and crashed. I know that’s the first thing I did. The CIA is not being very clear about it themselves, tweeting later in the day that nothing they say should be taken as an official statement. The CIA says they’re looking into it.

There’s a lot happening in the world.  Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. 

You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. 

Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.