Five Al-Qaeda’s main Online forums were taken down for two weeks. The forum ,Shumukh al-Islam,a primary source for Al-Qaeda videos and messages ,has been offline since March 22 , and since then four other sites have  been offline.

It might be the result of cyber attack launched by Government or hacker's group.  But no one claimed responsibility for this denial of service. Some other experts believed that site might have taken by admin itself ,if they suspected that the forum infiltrated by foreign spies.

"A lot of governments don't like Al Qaeda and there are a number of new entrants into cyberweapons field that, if they wanted to test their capabilities, this would be a fun target to practice on," says James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Certainly we [the US] could do it, so we're a candidate. But we're not the top of the list."


Experts offered evidence that the outages were the result of a DDoS attack: Other websites with IP addresses near the targeted jihadi sites were hit as well – apparent collateral damage of the same attack.

"It's consistent with a typical DDoS attack," says Mr. Bumgarner, a former military hacker. "There is usually some collateral damage to the digital neighbors of the primary website attacked."

Reportedly, only one website has been restored so far, other sites could be back online soon.