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.
The Web host is based in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. The servers that host the Al-Jazeera site are in France and the United States. Only the U.S. servers were under attack, said Arrashid, so the attackers were likely in the United States.
He said technicians were working to thwart the attack, but could not estimate when the site would be fully available again.
Al-Jazeera, also based in Qatar, is an unusually independent and powerful voice in the Arab world whose broadcasts of U.S. prisoners and war dead has angered many Americans. The English site carries at least one picture of a dead U.S. soldier.
Representatives of the broadcaster could not immediately be reached for comment.
In denial-of-service attacks, hackers normally send a deluge of false requests to Web servers, overloading them and making them unavailable to surfers.
Copyright 2003. Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
