A sustained DDoS attack has prevented WikiLeaks from releasing today a set of documents related to the failed Turkish coup and that it anonymously received.
Yesterday, WikiLeaks was teasing its Twitter followers with an upcoming leak that supposedly contained 300,000 emails and over 500,000 documents.
According to WikiLeaks, these documents were leaked from AKP (Turkish: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi / English: Justice and Development Party), which is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party, currently Turkey's biggest political force.
WikiLeaks announced the data dump just three days after a small faction of the Turkish military tried to take over the country's leadership via a military coup that failed hours after. 208 people were killed, and more than 2,000 wounded in the coup's aftermath.
Thousands of police officers and military personnel were arrested across the country over the weekend after the coup had failed. Human rights organizations have complained about Turkey beating prisoners and not bringing forward clear evidence. Some of them, including WikiLeaks, have gone on record and called it a purge of any political dissidents who might oppose Erdogan's rule.
A few hours after WikiLeaks announced the leak, the organization tweeted, "our infrastructure is under sustained attack."
Below are the relevant tweets. At the time of writing, even if it is Tuesday, the day of the leaks, WikiLeaks has failed to deliver on its promised data dump, probably delayed because of the attack.
Update [July 20, 2016]: WikiLeaks has released 294,548 emails from Turkey's AKP. Ten hours later, the Turkish regime has blocked access to WikiLeaks in the country.
#TurkeyCoup: Our pending release of 100k docs on Turkish political power? Just kidding. The first batch is 300k emails, 500k docs. #Erdogan — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 18, 2016
#TurkeyCoup: AKP supporters should pay attention. Our pending megaleak of docs both helps & harms AKP. Are you ready to find it all? — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 18, 2016
Our infrastructure is under sustained attack. #TurkeyPurge #Turkey — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 18, 2016
We are unsure of the true origin of the attack. The timing suggests a Turkish state power faction or its allies. We will prevail & publish. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 18, 2016
Turks ask whether WikiLeaks is pro or anti-AKP. Neither. Our only position is that truth is the way forward. 100k+ docs serves all sides. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 18, 2016
Turks will likely be censored to prevent them reading our pending release of 100k+ docs on politics leading up to the coup. (1/3) — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 18, 2016
We ask that Turks are ready with censorship bypassing systems such as TorBrowser and uTorrent (2/3) — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 18, 2016
And that everyone else is ready to help them bypass censorship and push our links through the censorship to come. (3/3) — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 18, 2016