Controversial Site WikiLeaks Suffers Brief Outage

Julian Assange’s secret dumping website WikiLeaks suffered a brief outage on Monday. Initially hailed as a bastion of truth, WikiLeaks was recently found by a Senate security report to have leaked Hillary Clinton campaign emails in 2016 at the behest of Russia as part of its campaign to help elect Donald Trump.

For a brief period on Monday, anyone who visited WikiLeaks found an error message, stating that a security certificate had expired and prevented the site from being accessed. The certificate in question reportedly helped the site run with private communications. The issue was resolved after a few hours.

Released by a Republican-led Senate committee earlier this month, the report on Russian interference in the 2016 election concluded that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked with Russian operatives during the election to sway its results. This involved Russian hackers stealing emails from Clinton’s campaign and releasing them through WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks was also reported to have likely been aware that it was directly aiding Russian subterfuge.

“I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t read it,” Trump said when asked about the report, later dismissively adding, “It’s all a hoax.”

Assange, who founded WikiLeaks in 2006, is currently jailed near London and is facing extradition to the U.S. to face charges for the release of diplomatic secrets by Chelsea Manning in 2010.

In 2010, he had been pursued by the Swedish government over allegations of sexual assault, which he denied. Swedish officials dropped the charges in 2019, citing poor evidence due to the long period that elapsed.