Duck Dynesty Links Broken

This morning I was trying to follow the Duck Dynasty mess and amazingly may of the links I attempted(notice I wrote attempted) to open reveal a file 404 error. All other links worked. The links at the Drudge Report works but smaller less known new sites had the links to this story corrupted. Is this the government minion hard at work? Do the large news sits have a security system that is to robust for the hackers to jack with the links or is it innept programming  at the smaller news sites. Hmmm? I have never had issues with link to any story on the smaller sites until now. Thinking about it I could not link to several stories about the this from the media giant Facebook either. Is it merely an overload of the data stream or an active collaboration to block this story? What does this foretell about our various means of connecting in the event of a national emergency? Or even a local emergency.