Amid flap over spying on Germany’s leader, NSA.gov goes down

The National Security Agency’s website was unavailable for users on Friday afternoon. Twitter accounts associated with the loosely-affiliated hacker group known as Anonymous called attention to the outage moments after the site went down, but there was no way to immediate identify a cause for its unavailability.

The website DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com confirmed the site was widely inaccessible just after 5 p.m. ET.

The outage comes amid continuing controversy surrounding electronic surveillance tactics employed by the U.S. government agency, fueled most recently by reports that the U.S. spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone.  German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere was so upset by the reports that he said U.S.-German relations “can’t simply return to business as normal.”