Someone attacked the website of Arab satellite television network Al-Jazeera on Tuesday, rendering it intermittently unavailable, the site's host said.

The newly launched English-language page, which went live Monday, was hardest hit in a bombardment of data packets known as a denial-of-service attack.

Ayman Arrashid, Internet system administrator at the Horizons Media and Information Services, the site's Web host, said the attack began Tuesday morning local time.

Nabil Hegazi, assistant to the managing editor of the English website, denied that an attack was the reason the site was unavailable. He said it was difficult to access because of traffic that was almost four times more than expected.

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