WASHINGTON: With Washington giving hot chase, WikiLeaks struggled to stay online on Friday while its founder, Julian Assange, reportedly hiding in Britain, said his team had stepped up security due to death threats.

Booted out from Amazon's servers, reportedly under political pressure, WikiLeaks went on the blink for several hours on Thursday, and was briefly hosted by a California service provider, Everydns. But Everydns also dumped it, saying it couldn't subject 500,000-odd customers to the cyber attacks targeting WikiLeaks.

The scuttlebutt in the cyberworld was that Amazon buckled under withering scrutiny from Uncle Sam, represented by Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security

WikiLeaks re-emerged on Friday with a Swiss domain, WikiLeaks.ch, and counted its first victim: an aide to German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, who was found to be behind a leaked cable.