PayPal downed by ‘hackers’ for Wikileaks censure

In addition to Visa and Mastercard, online payment processing giant PayPal has been knocked offline tonight by a loosely affiliated group of web users protesting the financial restraints placed on the Wikileaks operation.

As of now, Visa is back up and running and Mastercard appears to be mostly operational. However, PayPal is not accessible- although BoingBoing reports that the service is still functioning despite the site outage.

Mashable posted a list of attacks associated with Operation Payback:

After pulling the plug on payments to WikiLeaks, Mastercard’s website was taken down and remains out of service.

Senator Joe Lieberman’s website was taken down for 12 minutes (the first .gov site to be attacked).

Sarah Palin’s website was taken offline by a small group of Anonymous attackers.

The group sent spam faxes to Joe Lieberman’s office and to PostFinance.

PostFinance was attacked the hardest, leaving customers without the ability to conduct online banking.

They took down the website of the lawyer representing the two women who were allegedly raped/assaulted by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The group took down Assange’s Swedish prosecutor’s website.

PayPal has not addressed the outage on their Twitter feed as of yet.