NSA Says Website Downtime Was Caused By Botched Update, Not DDoS

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has denied rumours that the extended downtime of its website on Friday was caused by a DDoS attack, blaming an update error instead.

Some attributed the downtime to the ‘hacktivist’ movement Anonymous, while the Rustle League group claimed responsibility on Twitter, however, it soon turned out that the post was nothing more than a joke.

“Want to make media headlines? Wait for a large website to have a technical glitch. Say ‘site tango down’. Profit,” explains a message on the group’s Twitter feed.

The attack that never was

On Friday evening, the NSA.gov website suddenly disappeared from the Web for around eight hours and in the absence of official information, Twitter was buzzing with wild theories and rumours.

Last week, reports suggesed that the agency conducted extensive surveillance operations in France and Germany, even listening in on the calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and on Saturday, the “Stop Watching Us” rally was scheduled to take place in Washington, DC.

However, the NSA says the downtime was caused by an error during scheduled maintenance, and not any retaliatory campaign.

“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,” said the agency. “Claims that the outage was caused by a distributed denial of service attack are not true.”

Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom has proposed a ‘German Internet’, shielded from the prying eyes of foreign intelligence operations, following revelations that the NSA could have monitored Merkel’s phone.

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