Israeli websites down in 'technical malfunction'

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Israeli websites down in 'technical malfunction'

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Israel's official websites have gone down in what government says is a broad technical malfunction.

07 November,2011 04:21 am

The websites of Israels military and its intelligence services were down Sunday, two days after a hacker group appeared to threaten the Jewish state over its interception of a Gaza-bound flotilla.The websites of the Israel Defence Forces, the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency and the Mossad foreign intelligence service were all unavailable through the day and into the evening.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus office, whose website was functioning, said that the outage was caused by a technical glitch rather than by hackers.Israeli government websites crashed today because of a server malfunction, not as a result of a cyber attack, Ofir Gendelman, a Netanyahu spokesman, wrote in a posting on Twitter.The website problems came two days after a video apparently from hacktivist group Anonymous was posted on YouTube, threatening the Israeli government with retaliation over its interception of two Gaza-bound ships.The boats carrying 27 activists, crew and journalists were intercepted in international waters before they could breach Israels blockade on the Palestinian territory.It was the second time activists had tried to run the blockade since May 2010, when Israeli commandos raided a Turkish-led group of ships, killing nine Turkish activists and sparking a diplomatic crisis with Ankara.