Wikileaks announced via Twitter that it is under a massive denial of service attack.  The attack coincides with the planned publication of 250,000 documents later today.  The documents are apparently confidential diplomatic cables.

As it turns out, there may not be much of interest in this release.  Leaked copies of the German publication Der Spiegel appeared early on newsstands and according to German Twitter posts there’s nothing earth-shattering, at least from their point of view, in the documents.

The planned release is supposedly scheduled for 4:30 EST today in conjunction with the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel.  Some copies of Der Spiegel, though, apparently appeared on newsstands this morning.

According to CNN the “United States warned WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange that publishing the papers would be illegal and endanger peoples’ lives.”  It was shortly after this news that Wikileaks came under attack, and the online rumors began almost immediately.  It’s not exactly a stretch to think the US government may have something to do with it.  There’s certainly no shortage of blame against them floating around.  As one Twitter user put it:

Perhaps we will never know who is behind the attack.  Perhaps we’ll find out who’s behind it through a Wikileaks leak, which would be irony at its best.  I would think, though, that if the US government were found to be behind a DDOS attack against a website, especially Wikileaks, it would cause a backlash on a massive scale.