‘Internal error’ downs NSA website, says U.S. official

The U.S. National Security Agency’s website went down for several hours Friday, but the spy service blamed the outage on a technical mistake.

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, Agence France-Presse reported.

An NSA spokesperson said the claims were “not true.”

“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.

“Claims that the outage was caused by a distributed denial of service attack are not true.”

The website returned to full operation around 10:30 pm (0230 GMT Saturday).

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, reported AFP.

(With AFP)