(CNN) -- Details of classified U.S. government documents released by the whistleblower website Wikileaks were published Sunday by five international news outlets.
No documents had been posted on WikiLeaks, which said via Twitter earlier Sunday that it was under cyberattack, when the news outlets -- the New York Times, the Guardian in England, Le Monde in France, Der Spiegel in Germany and El Pais in Spain -- put details from the leaked documents on their websites.
The United States had warned WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange that publishing the papers would be illegal and endanger peoples' lives.
WikiLeaks is experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, it said. That's an effort to make a website unavailable to users, normally by flooding it with requests for data.
The U.S. State Department's legal adviser said Saturday that if any materials in the posting of documents by the site were provided by government officials without proper authorization, "they were provided in violation of U.S. law and without regard for the grave consequences of this action".
WikiLeaks indicated last week that it was preparing to release a new batch of previously classified U.S. military documents. CNN
