Hours before the controversial site WikiLeaks was supposed to release a new set of documents so scandalous that United States diplomats have reportedly been prepping foreign leaders to minimize damage to the State Department, it was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. As of this writing, there is no word yet on who might be responsible for the attack, which is meant to block communication between an online resource and potential users.

Controversial whistleblower website WikiLeaks is reporting that it's under a "mass distributed denial of service attack" just as its much-hyped leak of secret embassy cables has been leaked early on Twitter.

According to a tweet from the website's official Twitter account, WikiLeaks is experiencing a DDoS attack. The reported attackers are not yet known. Several reports state that the website has been experiencing intermittent downtime. We are currently attempting to verify that Wikileaks is indeed under attack.

Read the full story at Mashable.

The Atlantic's Chris Good has more on the story:

WikiLeaks announced soon after that, even if its website cannot be accessed, several prominent world newspapers -- the New York Times, Der Spiegel, El Pais, Le Monde, and the Guardian -- will publish the documents it had planned to release.