The website of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Sayyid Ali Khamenei, has been responding very slowly or not at all for most of the day, which is often symptomatic of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. However, with nobody claiming responsibility for such an attack – which is rather unusual lately – there could well be a less nefarious reason for the problems.

Earlier this year, the ‘hacktivist’ group Anonymous orchestrated a DDoS attack against leader.ir in support of Operation Iran, which accused Iran of operating an illegal regime for the past 32 years. This attack was not successful, but a separate attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcaster (irib.ir) did appear to succeed.