According to the Reuters newswire, the embassy's IT department was able to switch traffic to a mirror site - www.rusemborguk.ru – to keep its web site active, and in order to meet the increased interest of the public and media for information.
"Prior to the visit of Prime Minister David Cameron to Russia, the website of the Russian embassy in London (www.rusemb.org.uk) was brought down by a suspected DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack,” said the embassy's press statement.
Unconfirmed reports suggest that the cut-over to to the mirror site was seamless, suggesting – interestingly enough - that the embassy had contingency plans to cope with a site outage.
Reuters notes that the the UK's relations with Russia “have been soured by a dispute over the 2006 murder in London of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who died from poisoning by radioactive polonium-210.”.
Russia, says the newswire, subsequently refused to extradite Andrei Lugovoy, an ex-KGB bodyguard that the UK wanted to prosecute for Litvinenko's murder.
“That sent ties between the countries plunging to a post-Cold War low and led to tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions”, the newswire adds.
Reuters quotes a Russian embassy official as saying the site problems started last Friday evening and, whilst the site was available on Saturday, was down again on Sunday.