Earlier this month, Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei was arrested at the Beijing airport on his way to Hong Kong. Since his arrest, nearly 100,000 people had signed a petition for his release on social action platform Change.org.
Today, the site announced that it had been temporarily taken down by Chinese hackers in response to the petition.
The petition, started by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, was intended to “hasten the release” of Ai Weiwei and was co-signed by a number of museums all over the world. Ai Weiwei had been known for his role in the construction of the Beijing Olympic stadium and as China’s leading digital activist and a pioneer in the use of blogging and Twitter in China. More than 92,000 people, hailing from 175 countries, have signed the petition.
According to a release by Change.org, the attack began early Monday and made the site completely inaccessible at various points over the past 48 hours.
“We do not know the reason or exact source of these attacks,” said Change.org founder Ben Rattray. “All we know is that after the unprecedented success of a campaign by leading global art museums using our platform to call on the Chinese government to release Ai Weiwei, we became the victims of highly sophisticated denial of service attacks from locations in China.”
