Gov't website containing Martial Law history becomes inaccessible

The Presidential Museum and Library website under the domain malacañang.gov.ph, which contains the history of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.'s Martial Law regime, has become inaccessible.

Former Undersecretary Manolo Quezon III of the Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Office posted about the inaccessibility of the website on Monday morning, May 16.

"Http://malacanang.gov.ph where the repositories of the Presidential Museum and Library were, is gone," Quezon III, the grandson of former President Manuel Quezon, said in a statement posted on Twitter.

Based on government records, the Presidential Museum and Library is an agency under the Office of the President "tasked to preserve, manage, and promote the history and heritage of the Philippine Presidency."

GMA News Online tried to access http://malacanang.gov.ph using the Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, AVG, and Safari browsers, but all yielded the same result - the website could not be reached.

Quezon, however, assured the public that factual accounts on the Martial law regime of the late dictator Marcos remained available online under a different and private domain, Archive.org.

"Even if those were to be deleted, the content is already in books, and kept in http://Archive.org, which is for the public and not owned by the government," Quezon said.

"We placed copies of materials there precisely for that reason," he added.

The dictator's son, former Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr., is leading the partial and unofficial tally of election returns with 31 million votes as against second placer and opposition standard bearer, Vice President Leni Robredo, who has 14.8 million votes.

The Presidential Museum and Library, meanwhile, denied that malacanang.gov.ph had been deleted.

"[The site] is merely suspended following measures to update the content therein and improve its security features," the government office explained in a Facebook post.

The Library promised that the website's contents had not been compromised and would be made available to the public at the soonest possible time.

 — DVM, GMA News