Friday, September 19, 2008

Announcement: From Irrawaddy Magazine

Dear Friends and Subscribers,

Our Web site has been crippled and disabled by DDoS attacks since Wednesday.

Many in the Burmese community—both inside and outside Burma—believe that the military authorities are behind the cyber attack. Our Web hosting companies have been assisting us day and night tracing IP addresses to identify the cyber criminals.

If the junta’s paid stooges are indeed involved in these attacks, then we have learned a lesson—that the “powers that be” in Naypyidaw are nowadays well armed and more sophisticated.

Exiled media organizations, including The Irrawaddy, believe that foreign agents and cyber criminals have been hired to attack exiled Burmese Web sites.

We have offered our solidarity to fellow media Web sites, including the Democratic Voice of Burma and New Era Journal. They too have been badly crippled by the DDoS attacks.

However, we are not giving up and we will never give up. This is not a personal attack on the journalists and editors at The Irrawaddy—it is an attack on independent journalism and press freedom. The military junta is determined to prevent the flow of information in and out of Burma.

The attack will only make us more determined to focus on our mission—to bring you the truth from Burma and the region.

We will continue to provide our regular columns and timely news and analysis to you. You can now read The Irrawaddy news at a temporary site: http://theirrawaddy.blogspot.com.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to friends who helped us immediately by providing technical advice and consultancy to recover our site. Our special thanks go to Internews in Chiang Mai and SEAPA in Bangkok. We also would like to thank our readers and colleagues who sent messages of support and advice.

We would like to ask our readers for any support, technical advice or expertise they can lend us. As we are now rebuilding our site, using mirror sites and changing our Web hosting, we would also like to invite interested donors to contribute to our work.

Thank you.

The Irrawaddy

Online donations:
donations@irrawaddy.org
information@irrawaddy.org