The websites of the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention were knocked offline yesterday due to a sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
At the time of writing the Atheist Foundation's site was still null routed with the Global Atheist Convention site saying that it does not have enough information to confirm the source or reason for the attacks. The site has also called the attacks "not just an attack on atheism, but an attack on freedom of speech".
As reported at scienceblogs.com, AFA president David Nicholls said that "the Atheist Foundation of Australia supports freedom of thought, and that includes freedom of religion. Our aim is to keep the Australian government, education and welfare systems secular. Unfortunately, some people in our society find that very confronting."
The Atheist Foundation's Facebook page pointed to an Atheist Nexus discussion which states that sites are expected to return sometime today. The discussion also says that the attack on the sites ramped up from 500Mbps to 1Gbps and "took out most of the datacentre and Optus upstream was effected".
Some people don't like any point of view apart from their own.