Malaysiakini yesterday lodged a police report after its fibre-optic cable was snipped, rendering the news portal incapable of updating its content for several hours.

Malaysiakini IT manager Danny Hong, who lodged the report on behalf of the company, said that the Internet connection at its building in Bangsar Utama, which also hosts several other offices, was abruptly disrupted yesterday morning.

Upon further investigation, it was discovered that the fibre-optic cable had been cut.

"We have no choice but to use an alternate system to connect to our servers.

"The Unifi that we were using had a speed of 20Mbps, but the temporary system is only capable of 1Mbps, that means the speed we now have is 20 times slower," he said.

Hong added that the repairs will depend on Telekom Malaysia but expects normal services to be restored within three days.

In the interim, Malaysiakini is still able to update its servers albeit at a slower speed. However, bigger files such as photographs cannot be uploaded.

Possible act of sabotage

The news portal has not ruled out the possibility that this could be an act of sabotage.

"There has a been a pattern of cyber attacks against Malaysiakini in recent months, which include the DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks where our website was made inaccessible to our readers," said editor-in-chief Steven Gan.

Gan said that the attacks were launched against Malaysiakini in the weeks leading up to the Sarawak state election in April last year as well as on the eve of both the Bersih 2.0 and Bersih 3.0 rallies.

"This is the first time we see a possible physical attempt to shut down the website," said Gan.

He said that Malaysiakini is expecting more sabotage along the same lines in the lead-up to the next general election, where the Internet will play a major role in the electoral campaign.

"We are already taking mitigating measures to bolster the website and will work with Unifi to ensure that this will not happen again."

As of 5pm today, TM staff have managed to revive Malaysiakini's broadband connection.