The NSA’s website is down after world leaders get pissed about spying

This year has not been a good one for the NSA.

The U.S. spy agency’s website is officially down after a number of reports this week claimed the NSA had contact information for 35 unnamed world leaders, which it shared with other entities in the U.S. government.

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An NSA spokesperson told VentureBeat, “We are looking into the issue.”

The website is still down at the time of writing this post. It has been for almost an hour. We have yet to confirm whether or not this is the product of a distributed denial or service attack, or if this is a separate technical malfunction.

People on Twitter are claiming that this is Anonymous’ doing. That said, given Anonymous’ decentralization, responsibility claims from this group aren’t always very accurate.

https://twitter.com/TheHackersBay/status/393858814987862016

German chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s president Francois Hollande are now demanding new structure around international intelligence gathering. Merkel’s cell phone was supposedly tapped.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked information about the breadth of the NSA’s spying program, has been getting more vocal in the last month. He pointed a finger at the NSA this week saying, “Today, no telephone in America makes a call without leaving a record with the NSA. No Internet transaction enters of leaves American without passing through the NSA’s hands.”

We will update this post with more information on the cause of this downtime as soon as we hear more.