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Planned Parenthood has been at the receiving end of a war of words from activists and GOP politicians in the wake of controversial videos purporting to reveal that the health organization sells body tissue from aborted fetuses. (It doesn't.) Now the battle has moved from words to hacks. Planned Parenthood tweeted Wednesday afternoon that its site was under attack "by anti-abortion extremists," suggesting that a coordinated DDoS assault was trying to take the site offline. Though there were reports on Twitter of the site being down for a brief period, it quickly came back up.
"Today, the Planned Parenthood websites experienced a wide scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, a hacker tactic to overwhelm websites with massive amounts of traffic to block any legitimate traffic from getting in," Dawn Laguens, Executive Vice President of Planned Parenthood, told WIRED in an e-mail.
Planned Parenthood elected to take its site back offline for a day "in order to ensure that we are fully protected," Laguens wrote. "We’ll be redirecting visitors to our Facebook pages during that time. Planned Parenthood is committed to getting people the information they need to make healthy decisions and meet their goals in life—and we deeply regret that in order to more fully protect our websites from these extremist attacks, our full online content will be temporarily unavailable to people looking for good, accurate health information. We will continue to work to reach people where they are online, and our sites will be back up soon."
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This follows days of controversy for the women's health organization. Yesterday, a third video was released. Then, Republican Senators said they would vote to defund the organization. Today, Marco Rubio set off a Twitter firestorm after he tried to equate the unrelated story of Cecil-the-lion's murder to Planned Parenthood. And, after defending the organization earlier, Hillary Clinton today called the latest videos released "disturbing."
Updated at 11:52 p.m. ET with commentary from Planned Parenthood.
