The campaign of Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) is now accusing its political opponents — and he has many, considering he has to deal with not only Democrats but also a Republican primary challenge from U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison — of sabotaging his Web site and causing it to break down!
The Austin-American Statesman reports that the Perry campaign was hosting a live video Webcast, which crashed. “This planned and coordinated attack was political sabotage, and we are working to identify those responsible for this illegal activity,” said campaign spokesman Mark Miner.
The thing is, it appears quite possible that there might not have been any malicious attack at all. The Statesman’s reporter notes: “I logged in about 10 minutes before the Webcast and was able to see it, but another Statesman staffer who attempted to log in after it started got an error message that said: ‘Unable to connect to database server … This could mean your hosting provider’s database server is down.'”
A Democratic communications specialist told the paper that he doubts the hacker explanation, and guesses that the site was simply overloaded and crashed.
Hutchison’s campaign is ridiculing Perry. “What an embarrassing campaign launch,” Hutchison campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Baker said. “I’m sure the governor is hacked but we are skeptical their site was.”
But the Perry spokesman claimed that the site was injected with a code that made it crash, and they are working to find out who was responsible. “We were completely prepared for any amount of people that were going to log into this,” Miner said. “We had more than enough bandwidth.”
