A spate of cyberattacks reportedly crashed the whistleblower website WikiLeaks on Tuesday.

An Associated Press report said that the cyberattack took place after the "accelerated publication" of tens of thousands of sensitive US State Department cables.

The report said that WikiLeaks had published over 125,000 secret documents in the past week, which was far more than it had earlier published.

The rate and method of the new leaks raise new concerns about the confidentiality of secret documents for the US.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters, "The United States strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of classified information."

"In addition to damaging our diplomatic efforts, it puts individuals’ security at risk, threatens our national security and undermines our effort to work with countries to solve shared problems. We remain concerned about these illegal disclosures and about concerns and risks to individuals.

"We continue to carefully monitor what becomes public and to take steps to mitigate the damage to national security and to assist those who may be harmed by these illegal disclosures to the extent that we can." she said.

According to the report, WikiLeaks responded saying, "Dear governments, if you don’t want your filth exposed, then stop acting like pigs. Simple."

According to AP, WikiLeaks tweeted about the cyberattack on Twitter late Tuesday: "WikiLeaks.org is presently under attack."

The website also directed visitors to a mirror site, cablegatesearch.net.

Though the WikiLeaks website was up and running on Wednesday, a message on the website reads: "WikiLeaks is currently under heavy attack."

Last week, online hacktivist group Anonymous had said that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on WikiLeaks are futile, and will receive a fitting reply.

The hacker group — infamous for their attacks against Visa, Mastercard, Sony and The Sun – shot into limelight late last year after it brought down the services of Visa and Mastercard against the decision to block payment access to whistleblower and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The group claimed on a blog that "governments" were not doing anything over those attacks, even after Assange requested for a probe into the cyberattacks.

"Wikileaks is under constant Denial of Service attacks, and Julian Assange has requested an investigation into the matter, but yet nothing has legally been done. We are in contact with Wikileaks, as we are both under the same botnet denial of service attacks,"Anonymous had said.

"Since the governments who imprison people for conducting such actions upon corporate servers will not do anything, Anonymous will now once again step up and defend the weak from the oppressive."

The group added, "Whether it is a government institution, or individuals — you shall receive our justice. These attacks accomplish nothing but stirring up a hornets nest, and if that was the goal — your mission has been accomplished."