Outage for Al-Jazeera English Site

The English language version of the Al-Jazeera web site was offline for more than five hours last night, two days after the Qatar-based television network broadcast videotape of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Attempts to access english.aljazeera.net returned a "504 Gateway Timeout" message from the site's web host, AT&T WorldNet Services. "The web site you are attempting to access is currently unreachable," the message states. "This may be due to a network outage, or the web site might be experiencing technical difficulties."

A dynamically updating performance chart for english.aljazeera.net is available here.

The network's Arabic web site, www.aljazeera.net, remained available throughout. Al-Jazeera's English-language site was launched in March 2003, just after the start of the war in Iraq. In its first week it was hacked and then redirected, apparently by attackers unhappy with the site's display of the bodies of American soldiers killed in Iraq.

On Friday, Al-Jazeera aired a videotape of bin Laden, in which the Al Qaeda leader took responsibility for the September 11 terrorist attacks and warned Americans that more attacks loomed unless the U.S. alters its policies. The U.S. State Department on Friday asked the government of Qatar to discourage Al Jazeera from broadcasting the bin Laden video, a senior State Department official said.