Hackers' attacks and technical glitches have brought down the new English-language website of Arab satellite TV network Al Jazeera.
The Qatar-based network, which has in the past aired messages from Osama bin Laden, has faced a storm of criticism in the United States for broadcasting Iraqi footage of five US prisoners of war and at least eight corpses.
Al Jazeera's two Domain Name Servers (DNS), both its primary DNS and Secondary DNS, have both been inaccessible throughout the day.
ZDNet has reported that it "is unlikely to result from too much 'legitimate' traffic going to the site. DNS processing does not use a lot of system resources, and does not use a lot of traffic. Furthermore, the two name servers are hosted on different IP ranges, which is unlikely to spring from a run-of-the-mill system outage."
Its new site ( english.aljazeera.net ) went live on Monday, but was quickly hit by hacker attacks - as was the Arabic-language site ( www.aljazeera.net ).
Staff were unable to update the English site for about four hours yesterday, said its managing editor MsJoanne Tucker.
"We've had a lot of obstacles thrown in our way," Ms Tucker said. "I thought the launch of this site would be quite smooth and wouldn't make too many waves, but the reaction has been amazing. It has been almost surreal."
Al Jazeera's information technology manager Mr Salah Al Seddiqui said the company was also told by its Qatar-based vendor that US-based DataPipe could no longer host its site from the end of the month. Al Seddiqui said the company was moving its servers to Europe.
Ms Tucker said war sensitivities may have been behind the decision, but DataPipe said in a statement it was ending its relationship with a company that manages Al Jazeera's site on March 31st. It said it had no direct ties with Al Jazeera.
The new English-language site has no multi-media capability but carried photos from the footage showing the US prisoners of war. The Arabic-language site had the video, prompting a flood of traffic on Sunday.
Meanwhile, the Al Jazeera television wing of the organisation, which beams into 35 million Arab homes, received an award today for its resistance of censorship.
The accolade from the British-based Index on Censorship was given for Al Jazeera's "apparent independence in a region where much of the media is state-run."