WikiLeaks, which was slated to publish millions of potentially embarrassing classified memos between US diplomats this weekend, is experiencing what it calls a mass distributed denial-of-service attack, in which attackers try to flood the site with irrelevant requests to shut it down.

The site has been offline sporadically for the last few minutes, loading slowly if it loads at all.

The organization warned of the attack via Twitter this morning, and the site disappeared under various error messages shortly after that. This isn't the first time the site has been attacked: it also suffered a DDOS attack in 2008, after releasing some documents about trust structures in the Cayman Islands.

Looks like somebody doesn't want this to be the news story of the weekend. Unfortunately for those parties, WikiLeaks claims that major international papers, including the New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais, and Le Monde, will publish excerpts from the cables later today even if the site is down.