The National Security Agency’s website went down for several hours, but the US spy service known for hacking into computer networks blamed the outage on a technical mistake.
The website, NSA.gov, went down on Friday in the afternoon, setting off speculation on Twitter that the site may have suffered a denial of service attack by hackers. But an NSA spokesperson denied the claims, saying they were “not true.” “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,” the spokesperson added. “Claims that the outage was caused by a distributed denial of service attack are not true.” The website was operational again around 10:30 pm.
The hacker group anonymous joked about the incident in a tweet, without saying if it had played any role. “Aw don’t panic about nsa.gov being down. They have a backup copy of the internet,” it said.