The National Security Agency’s website went down for several hours Friday, but the US spy service known for hacking into computer networks blamed the outage on a technical mistake.<\/p>\n
The website, NSA.gov, went down in the afternoon, setting off speculation on Twitter that the site may have suffered a denial of service attack by hackers.<\/p>\n
But an NSA spokesperson denied the claims, saying they were “not true.”<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“Claims that the outage was caused by a distributed denial of service attack are not true.”<\/p>\n
The website was operational again around 10:30 pm (0230 GMT Saturday).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The loosely organized, international hacker collective has frequently clashed with US authorities over file-sharing as well as allowing banks to handle donations to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.<\/p>\n
The NSA has been at the center of a furor over its vast electronic surveillance operations, revealed in a series of leaks from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who has obtained asylum in Russia.<\/p>\n
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