Bangkok: Several Thai government websites went offline on Wednesday evening (30 September) in a suspected Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

The websites of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) ministry, the state-owned CAT Telecom and the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) were among those affected.

The Thai government’s main website and the finance ministry website also went offline later on Wednesday.

The alleged DDoS attacks came after online communities threatened action to protest the government’s Single Gateway plan, which aims to ‘control inappropriate websites and information flows from other countries via the Internet’, according to an ICT statement.

According to online sources, the activists had planned to start the attacks at 10:00pm (11:00pm Singapore time), but the ICT Ministry website was already affected at 7:00pm local time.

Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition against the proposal, dubbed the ‘Great Firewall of Thailand’, with critics saying it will allow the military to further increase censorship as well as leave the country’s IT hub status vulnerable if the gateway fails.