Indymedia sites worldwide go down

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Earlier today most of Indymedia, which is a collective of independent media centre went offline could not be accessed. Initially bloggers and Twitter users in Greece suspected that the disappearance of Indymedia Athens was the result of government attempts to silence the site. Recently the state - run OTE telecommunications company had threatened to sue the Metsovo National Polytechnic claiming that their hosting of Indymedia violated the terms of their agreement. However, it quickly transpired than the outage was not limited to just Greece and had affected Indymedia sites across Europe and North America.

According to the Entropic Memes blog  argued that the problem stems from the organisation's failure to provide correct WHOIS information. The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) can put on hold or cancel the domain name if after a period of 45 days false or fake WHOIS details are not updated, However, the ICANN has no record of any action being taken against Indymedia.org concerning the inclusion of a fake web address as a name server.  Blogger, Entropic Memes stated that the decision to take down a site for this reason is unprecedented.

Indymedia was originally set up in Seattle in 1999 during the anti - World  Trade Organisation demonstrations and describes itself as, "a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage."