A website that documents fake hate crimes mysteriously went dark on Sunday, shortly after it was updated to add the Jussie Smollett hoax to the site’s database.
According to isitdownrightnow.com, a website that tracks outages, fakehatecrimes.org has been down for more than 23 hours.
Twitter users have been reporting today that they are unable to access the site:
@getongab Looks like https://t.co/0gqdbcCGq8 has been closed down.
— Ichabod's Bucket of Destiny (@ichabodsbucket) February 18, 2019
How odd. https://t.co/znO0ig7Jtw is down:https://t.co/RbyDzJ6cRm
— Debra Heine (@NiceDeb) February 18, 2019
A cached version of the site from Google shows that the most recent entries in the database were related to Smollet’s now-debunked allegation that he was attacked on the streets of Chicago by MAGA hat-wearing thugs who shouted racial and homophobic epithets at him and placed a noose around his neck. Police have since announced that they believe the Empire star paid two Nigerian brothers to fabricate the story.
It’s not clear at this point whether the site has gone dark due to technical issues, perhaps related to an influx of traffic to the site that the servers couldn’t handle, or as a result of malicious hackers who don’t want the public to know about the fake hate crimes in the database.
PJM attempted to reach out to fakehatecrimes.org, but their contact form was inaccessible due to the site outage. We’ll update this story as more information becomes available.
Update 4:49 p.m. EST: The site is now back online, though the cause of the outage is still unknown.
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