Bush Web site seen blocking foreigners

updated 5:00 p.m. ET Oct. 27, 2004

LONDON - U.S. President George W. Bush's official campaign Web site has blocked access to foreign Web surfers since Monday, an Internet monitoring company said Wednesday.

Netcraft, based in Bath, England, said the site, GeorgeWBush.com, "appears to be rejecting visitors from most points outside the United States, while allowing access from U.S. locations."

Netcraft did not report any reason for the blockage. "We can't say precisely, except that it seems to be a decision by the maintainers of the Web site," Rich Miller, an analyst at Netcraft, said in a telephone interview.

Miller said the company had detected a six-hour outage last week which affected by the Bush Web site and www.RNC.org, the site of the Republican National Committee. The latter site was accessible from Britain Wednesday.

"Last week's simultaneous outages for GeorgeWBush.com and RNC.org prompted speculation that an electronic attack may have occurred, as the two sites are hosted on separate Web servers," Miller said in a statement posted on Netcraft's Web site. "The Bush campaign told media the outage was 'no big deal' and offered no specific explanation for the outage."

Netcraft said it monitors Web site response times from four locations within the United States and three in other countries.

"Since Monday morning, requests to GeorgeWBush.com from stations in London, Amsterdam and Sydney, Australia have failed, while the four U.S. monitoring stations show no performance problems. Web users in Canada report they are able to visit the site," Netcraft said.

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