The Guardian website appears to be down, amid reports that some level of blocking has occurred in regards to their WikiLeaks coverage.
I have heard reports that it has been officially blocked in Thailand, but I’ve not seen confirmation as yet. Certainly, it appears inaccessible from here in Australia at the moment.
So is it up, down, or blocked in some way?
Here is the tail of a traceroute I’ve just performed from my network to “www.guardian.co.uk”, with the trace losing results after it gets to the hosting provider involved, Prolexic:
Here is the tail of a traceroute for another site hosted by Prolexic – (in this case “www.legends.com”):
In the second instance, the trace makes it all the way through to the end server, and as you can see, travels the same route into the Prolexic network. Interesting, and demonstrates that Prolexic themselves are up externally, meaning the problem is internal to Prolexic or the Guardian themselves.
This also might not mean anything at all. Network engineers can deliberately cause this to happen, for reasons as simple as hiding network information. So the server may well be up.
It could just as easily be down for a legitimate reason.
It could be suffering some kind of DDoS attack from anti-WikiLeaks groups.
It could be blocked – but I doubt it, as doing that would create a dangerous precedent in the free-speech debate.
Overall, it is the timing that is interesting, given the publicity it is currently receiving in regards to WikiLeaks. My guess is it is under DDoS attack – as Prolexic themselves seem to be up – so the next few hours will be interesting until we hear some news.
The problem is, if the site is inaccessible for sinister reasons, that’s not what we will hear.
Ironically.