Within hours, according to the cybersecurity researchers at Panda Labs, the loose group of hackers that calls itself Anonymous launched a distributed denial of service attack that threw junk traffic at the web server of the blog that had made the WikiLeaks announcement, and by 4am had taken the site offline.

FORBES: WikiLeaks Supporters Aim Cyberattacks At PayPal

"The name server that is authoritative for Microsoft's Web sites might have crippled under a Denial of Service attack, " he said.

CNN: Microsoft Web sites suffer large scale blackout