The Craigslist sites for Canadian cities have been down this morning, with only a cryptic message of explanation on the homepage that refers to terms of use violations. Here's the error message that greets would-be bargain hunters: "The website formerly operating at this domain violated craigslist's Terms of Use (TOU), and/or enabled or facilitated others in violating the TOU, and/or infringed craigslist's trademark(s) or other intellectual property."

That's strange. The website formerly operating at this domain presumably was Craigslist itself, no? The note also goes on to say that the company "does not permit automated posting or the employment of posting agents (software or human)" and "may take action at any time against those jeopardizing the website or its user experience."

Is this evidence that the site got hacked? As of yet no confirmation or further explanation has been offered as Craigslist has yet to comment on the issue. The American sites remain unaffected.

Over at OpenFile Toronto, John Michael McGrath points out that should you really want to continue the search for that Febreze-soaked pair of skates you've got your sights on, changing your computer to use open DNS should get you back into the site. He's also right about something else, too. The help forums are hilarious if you've got the stomach for anonymous internet rage, which, you know, clearly I do.

Update (1:28pm):

Although Wired (and some of our Twitter followers) report that they can access the site, many others are now getting a domain registration webpage in place of the initial TOU note.

Update (2:00pm)

There are still lots of reports of users being able to successfully access the site, but one of our readers informed us that as of 2:00pm or so, those who can't get onto Craigslist are now getting a less cryptic (but no more informative) error message.