INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

Planned Parenthood Says Website ‘Under Attack,’ Taken Offline By Abortion Opponents

By Mike Bessler
Published on: 15:45 PST, Jul 29, 2015

Planned Parenthood has engaged detractors on a number of fronts recently, and earlier today, the organization notified supporters of a yet another new attack, this time originating from cyberspace. According to Wired, Planned Parenthood took to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon, spreading the word that their official website had been taken offline, laying the blame on anti-abortion hackers.

Wired further noted that PlannedParenthood.org had fallen victim to a coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack. The website Digital Attack Map, which tracks the top daily DDoS attacks worldwide, defines such an attack as “an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources.” A few hours after their website went down, Planned Parenthood commented again on the matter, describing the cyberspace shenanigans as “a new low.”

At present, the organization’s site offers a redirect link that takes visitors to the Facebook page for Planned Parenthood Action. Organizers offered further comment in a post to that page.

“Today, anti-abortion extremists briefly blocked any traffic from going to plannedparenthood.org— a site that 200,000 people count on every day for health info and services.”

“If it wasn’t clear that these attacks are an attempt to cut people off from care, an attack on the PP website makes it CRYSTAL clear.”

Marie Lodi of Jezebel noted that Wednesday’s incident was the second cyberattack on Planned Parenthood’s site in the past week. On Sunday, hackers leaked personal information belonging to Planned Parenthood employees across the country. Regarding the most recent incident, Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens noted that the organization regained control of their servers shortly after but opted to take the site down for re-tooling.

“Although our websites were back online shortly after the attack, in order to ensure that we are fully protected, we’ve made the decision to take our website offline for a day,” said Laguens. “Planned Parenthood is committed to getting people the information they need to make healthy decisions and meet their goals in life — and we deeply regret that in order to more fully protect our websites from these extremist attacks, our full online content will be temporarily unavailable to people looking for good, accurate health information.”

As previously reported by Inquisitr, Planned Parenthood has been faced with increasing scrutiny following the release of a number of “hidden video” interviews that purportedly outline some of the organization’s more controversial practices. Congressional hearings on the videos, as well as hearings on the matter of continued government funding for Planned Parenthood, are likely to follow at some point in the near future.

[Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images]

Share this article: Planned Parenthood Says Website ‘Under Attack,’ Taken Offline By Abortion Opponents
News Planned Parenthood
More from Inquisitr