On Wednesday, the UK Ministry of Justice confirmed that its website, justice.gov.uk, had stopped working after a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack.
The launch of the government website was announced on Twitter.
“The Department of Justice website is back online and operational. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by the downtime,” said a message posted about three hours after the attack began.
The hacktivists who claimed responsibility for the downtime claimed they attacked the Justice Department website because it did not condemn the NSA's surveillance operations.
However, some users criticized the hackers for this attack, arguing that they should not block the public's access to legal services.
At this time, the Ministry of Justice website appears to be functioning properly.
The Ministry of Justice website wasn't the only one to be hit by a DDOS attack on Wednesday. The GCHQ website also went down for the same reason.
