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The firm Akamai Technologies is reported to have suddenly cancelled a contract on Wednesday, in a move that was said to be nothing to do with technical issues.

Al Jazeera, which is best known for airing messages from Osama bin Laden, has run into seriously difficulties online since the war in Iraq began as its site has suffered persistent attacks by hackers.

Last week, hackers replaced the site with a logo of the United States flag and the message 'Let Freedom Ring'. Visitors to the English-language site saw the flag shaped like a map of America, while surfers to the Arabic site were redirected to a pornography site.

According to Al Jazeera, it said was not surprised by the decision and told the New York Times that the reason behind the move was "non-stop political pressure on these companies not to deal with us".

The Cambridge-based Massachussetts firm Akamai refused to fully elaborate on its decision and company spokesman Jeff Young would only confirm that it was no longer doing business with Al Jazeera.

"Akamai worked briefly this week with Al Jazeera to understand the issues they are having distributing their websites. We ultimately decided not to continue a customer relationship with Al Jazeera, and we are not going to be providing them our services," Young said.

Akamai was hired after the aforementioned attacks on the English-language version of Al Jazeera's site. Al Jazeera was hoping that Akamai would provide its site with protection from patriotic US hackers.

As well as hackers, it has high levels of traffic to attend to. According to search engine AltaVista, Al Jazeera has been the eighth most searched-for term on the site since the Iraq war began.

Joanne Tucker, the managing editor of the Al Jazeera English-language site, told the NY Times: "Basically this was our answer to the hacking that has been non-stop and pretty aggressive. We had a done-and-dusted deal on March 28. Then yesterday, we get a letter from them terminating the contract."

Despite winning the eyeballs of Arab viewers, Al Jazeera's war has been a bumpy one. It had already earned the extreme displeasure of Washington and London, after it broadcast pictures showing dead and captured allied troops, while yesterday it had two of its reporters banned by the Iraqi Information Ministry.

Al Jazeera's American financial correspondents were banned from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, after it first broadcast images of captured coalition forces.

The US has also accused the satellite broadcaster of exaggerating civilian deaths -- charges that the station denies.

Tucker said that Al Jazeera hoped to have its English site up within 24 hours, but today it was still not back and without server firewall protection, hackers are bound to be back to take another crack at the site.

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