Taiwanese websites experience cyberattacks ahead of Pelosi’s visit

At least four Taiwanese websites experienced intermittent outages Tuesday due to some minor cyberattacks just ahead of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s arrival in Taiwan.

The denial-of-service (DoS) attack, in which hackers send an overwhelming flood of requests to the computers to impair normal users accessing a site, sent 200 times the average volume of traffic compared with a normal day, said Chang Tun-Han, a spokesman for the presidential office.

Access to the website was restored within about 20 minutes of the attack, the statement said. Taiwanese government agencies were monitoring the situation in the face of “information warfare,” a spokesperson later added.

The cyberattacks appear to be continuing, according to checks by The Wall Street Journal. At around 7:30 p.m. local time, some Taiwanese government websites, including the one belonging to the President's Office, were down again for around half an hour, displaying error messages or saying the website couldn't be found. After a brief resumption of operation, some of the websites were knocked out once more at around 9:10 p.m. local time.