Lisi Niesner / Reuters A man wearing an anonymous mask stands in front of the Hungarian embassy in Vienna January 14, 2011.

Related Virgin Media attacked by opponents of The Pirate Bay block BBC

It looks like Virgin Media may be the latest victim of a site takedown by Anonymous: The hacktivist group is claiming that it targeted the Internet service provider’s website in response to Virgin Media’s block of popular torrent site The Pirate Bay. As of 8:15 a.m. ET, http://www.virginmedia.com was unresponsive from the U.S., returning a “failed to open page” error (via Safari).

Virgin Media recently agreed to block The Pirate Bay after Britain’s High Court ordered ISPs in the U.K. to shut off access to the Sweden-based file-sharing site. Other ISPs in the country who’ve agreed to do so include Everything Everywhere, O2, Sky and TalkTalk. BT, a sixth, asked for extra time to determine whether it would comply with the order or not.

“DOWN DOWN DOWN! – Tango Down #OpTPB virginmedia.com,” reads a Twitter dispatch from one of several Twitter handles associated with the hacker group. The message went out about 20 hours ago, corresponding with the timeframe during which Virgin Media’s website was first reported inaccessible.

Virgin Media released a statement yesterday (via BBC) noting that the distributed denial of service attack — an assault on a computer system designed to overwhelm it — began at 5:00 p.m. BT (12:00 p.m. ET) and lasted only an hour. It added that it was only blocking The Pirate Bay in response to court orders.

As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders but we strongly believe that tackling the issue of copyright infringement needs compelling legal alternatives, giving consumers access to great content at the right price, to help change consumer behaviour.

Twitter accounts associated with Anonymous continued through the rest of the day and last night to claim Virgin Media’s site was offline, and the site remains inaccessible this morning. Anonymous also claims to have targeted TalkTalk, but the company hasn’t confirmed this, and its site is currently up and available.