Tens of thousands of confidential U.S. government communications spanning several years were published Sunday after being leaked by the whistle-blower website Wikileaks.
Reports on the documents' contents, and in some cases the documents themselves, were posted on the websites of five newspapers around the world -- The New York Times, The Guardian in England, Le Monde in France, Der Spiegel in Germany and El Pais in Spain -- that had prior access to them.
However, WikiLeaks had not posted the documents after saying earlier in the day it was under cyber attack. CNN has not had advanced access to the documents because the company declined to sign a confidentiality agreement with WikiLeaks.
The documents posted include candid and often unfavorable commentaries on foreign leaders, as well as coverage of almost every major issue of recent years. The United States had warned WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange that publishing the papers would be illegal and endanger peoples' lives.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs condemned the release of secret documents, including diplomatic material.
In a statement Sunday, Gibbs said, in part, that "such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government."
"By releasing stolen and classified documents, Wikileaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals," Gibbs' statement said. "We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information."
In its statement on Twitter, Wikileaks said it was experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. That's an effort to make a website unavailable to users, normally by flooding it with requests for data.
Read More: Leaked classified documents lift curtain on U.S. foreign policy
