A day after Wikileaks dropped one of the biggest leaked bombshells on the U.S. government, perhaps since the Pentagon Papers, typing wikileaks.org into a browser is likely to get you nothing more than a blank browser window.
The somewhat mysterious collective site released over 91,000 secret reports related to the Afghan War that paint a bleak picture of the war effort. The New York Times, (UK) Guardian and Germany's Der Spiegel were given access to the documents a month previous to their going live on Wikileaks. The New York Times released its reporting on the document on Sunday.
The posting of the secret documents online drew condemnation from the White House, has put "wikileaks" or "wikileaks afghanistan" at the top of Google Trends for much of the past 48 hours, and has brought Wikileaks' servers to their knees.
In Monday's early morning hours, a post from the Wikileaks Twitter account redirected the world to another one:
WikiLeaks is tremendously overloaded. Please use http://bit.ly/9RlJQA
Under the mask is a new subdomain - http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/ which is located, well, who knows where. Wikileaks founder, Australian Julian Assange (also quite popular on trends today) has said that the organization has servers on several continents and that packets to and from the site pass through countries like Iceland and Sweden whose laws have strong free speech and information rights protections.
Since the "War Diaries" went live, it's been reported that Wikileaks' servers have been shut down in some countries, but the system redirects to other countries as the traffic demand allows. In the past, Wikileaks has also used the Pirate Bay as a backup server.
Wikileaks has been in the midst of a fundraising campaign to improve its technical capability, something that the site is likely to need, as its founder says that more explosive revelations will be forthcoming .
Interestingly, one of Wikileaks' server overload pages does include a link to a fundraising page on the same domain which has no problem loading.
