More accurately, the problems were because of a series of cyber-attacks against CYXYMU's accounts on various blogging platforms. A little backstory - CYXYMU is the handle of a Georgian blogger, likely from the disputed Abkhazia region (CYXYMU is based on the Cyrillic-text name of Abkhazia’s capital, Sukhumi). He/she has been a vocal critic of the actions of the Georgian and Russian governments over last year's conflict in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which is apparently what put CYXYMU in the cyber-attacker's crosshairs yesterday.
But as Evgeny Morozov points out on the blog Net Effect, CYXYMU isn't a crusading investigative journalist and, in Morozov's opinion (he has also followed CYXYMU's postings on LiveJournal, the most popular blogging site in Russia and where CYXYMU does a lot of their writing), not terribly interesting. So, Morozov suggests, that the coordinated cyber-attack was more an exercise in showing off on the part of the attackers than a real attempt to silence CYXYMU.
In his commentary, Morozov asks if CYXYMU could become the first, as he calls it, "digital refugee". A blogging platform (Twitter, Blogger, LiveJournal, take your pick) when faced with a problematic user, in this case CYXYMU, could just choose to shut down their account in order to keep the service operating smoothly. It's not censorship, per se, rather a business decision to not disrupt the habits of millions of other users, though the end effect is the same.
It is an interesting take on the future of free speech in the world of new media.
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