We’re back, good to see you again! We’ve been battling with a cyber attack since Tuesday evening May 3rd. Sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused.

Here’s what happened: Since Tuesday evening May 3rd, all Radio Netherlands websites became inaccessible due to a cyber attack. The so-called DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service) caused massive disturbance, and tens of thousands of people around the world were unable to access RNW’s websites.

The attack started around 22.00 hours local time, on the domain rnw.nl. RNW’s websites in other languages fall under that domain. We tried to work around the problem by referring visitors to our mobile (‘lite’) sites. But on Wednesday morning the attack intensified also putting our mobile site out of action.
 
During a DDoS attack, a website is bombarded with large amounts of data. This causes the website to slow down or, like in our case, to become blocked completely. We don’t know yet who is behind the attack.
 
RNW’s general director Jan Hoek: “A cyber attack shows the vulnerability of new media.  RNW is an international organisation and free speech is of the utmost importance to us. Luckily, we’re still able to reach most of our worldwide audience with independent information through our 3,000 media partners.”
 
Radio Netherlands Worldwide has websites in ten languages; Dutch, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French, Chinese, Indonesian, Papiamentu and Sarnami. In addition, we also run the International Justice site. All of our websites were down during the attack.
 
But now we’re back.