WikiLeaks website back up on Swiss network after six-hour shutdown

LONDON - WikiLeaks is up and running again on a Swiss network a few hours after the company providing its DNS services terminated the whistleblower website’s account.

According to News.com.au, some leaked cables were still not loading on the new www.wikileaks.ch site, but they were viewable for the most part after the six-hour shutdown.

“WikiLeaks moves to Switzerland,” the group declared on Twitter, although an Internet trace of the new domain name suggested that the site itself was still hosted in Sweden and France.

Earlier in the day, WikiLeaks was offline after US-based EveryDNS.net terminated its domain name system services.

“WikiLeaks.org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks,” WikiLeaks had tweeted.

The shutdown came two days after Amazon Web Services (AWS) decided to end its hosting agreements with WikiLeaks, resulting in the website going offline for several hours until it was moved back to its previous Swedish host Bahnhof.

EveryDNS.net had said that WikiLeaks had violated their provision which states that “Member shall not interfere with another Member’s use and enjoyment of the Service or another entity’s use and enjoyment of similar services.”

“The termination of services was effected pursuant to, and in accordance with, the EveryDNS.net Acceptable Use Policy,” a statement had said.

“The interference at issues arises from the fact that wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites,” the statement added.

The termination came amid massive controversy for WikiLeaks, where the whistleblower website began releasing 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables in its biggest leak so far, angering leaders across the globe.

According to reports, WikiLeaks needed to register wikileaks.org - which it owns until 2018 - with another domain host in order to get its site up and running again. (ANI)