Agora is hacked, or something’s wrong with it.

If there is what might be called a command center for the on-going political rallies in Korea, it is the public discussion forum called Agora, especially its free discussion room, where mostly liberal people—collectively known as Agorians—exchange in real time all kinds of information and opinion about current and future rallies.

However, Agora’s free discussion room has stopped functioning properly for more than four hours. Normally those posts that get most recommendations are selected and shown in a special box at the top of the discussion room on a regular basis—about every five minutes or so—for those users who didn’t get a chance to read them due to a huge volume of postings. (During high traffic periods tens of posts are uploaded in a second.) But the top box for best postings has been showing the same posts since around 4:25AM (June 6, in local time), when people started questioning the role of those who participated in rallies in their “reserve army” uniform. (In Korea, the uniform is a sign of having served in the military, and some reserve army members have been participating in rallies wearing the uniform.) Since then, all those posts that raised the same doubt have been erased.

Agora has had some instances of malfunction (largely due to excessive traffic volumes), but the host company, Daum, has always posted public notices of problems and fixed them promptly. But this time, Daum is said to be still figuring out what the problem is, more than four hours and twenty minutes after the incidence.

Agora seems hacked. Or something of that sort has happened.