The right-wing Canadian media company that hosts Mark Latham’s Outsiders is in disarray, with its servers cut off on Monday and senior staff deserting the outfit.

Mark Latham announced he would partner with Rebel Media after he was sacked from Sky News earlier this year over a series of defamatory slurs, including against colleagues. Latham’s low-budget video have since been hosted on The Rebel’s website, as well on his own website.

But over the past few weeks, The Rebel has descended into chaos: it’s had to distance itself from the alt-right, fend off advertising boycotts and sack a contributor for appearing on a neo-Nazi podcast. And on Monday, it was cut off by its server to half the world without explanation (it’s since been put back online).

The Rebel is an online-only news and commentary website, which is funded by small donations and paywall access, as well as larger backers. There are short, free videos, and longer weekly programs behind a paywall. Its YouTube channel has more than 850,000 subscribers. It bills Latham on his page as “Australia’s most rebellious man”, and his weekly online-only TV program is listed as a “premium show”.

The site was founded by Ezra Levant in 2015, after ending his stint as a contributor at a failed Fox News-style cable TV channel in Canada.

Levant (who calls himself Rebel Commander) told Reuters yesterday that the site was down for users in about half the world because its server stopped directing traffic to the site. He didn’t know the reason, but said it was “terrifying” if it was political censorship. And he had reason to suspect it could be over the site’s editorial direction. Some technology companies including Google last week pushed offline the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, which helped organise the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this month. A woman who was among counter-protesters was killed by a car driven into the crowd, and The Rebel has been criticised for its soft coverage of the events. Contributor Faith Goldy was fired when she went on a Daily Stormer podcast last week discussing the rally. In it, she said she saluted the white supremacists who showed up to the rally: “not a Roman salute, guys”. Levant said of the appearance, “It was just too far”.

Rebel co-founder Brian Lilley and two contributors have quit since the Charlottesville violence, and they’ve all said they were worried about the site’s editorial judgements, which has also included a sympathetic profile of alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos (Levant calls him “outrageous but loveable”).

Another former employee has accused The Rebel of misappropriating funds it has raised from both small contributors and its bigger backers. In a YouTube video posted last week, Caolan Robertson said he’d been offered “hush money” by Levant, that contributors were encouraged to spruik petitions so the site could gather email addresses, and that there was no transparency on how donations were spent. Levant has responded to those accusations by saying he’s being blackmailed.

A group campaigning for advertising boycotts on US right-wing news website Breitbart has started a Canadian offshoot trying to do the same for The Rebel. The anonymous group, Sleeping Giant, has been lobbying brands including 7-Eleven, General Motors Canada and the Canadian Mint to pull advertising from the site.

In the wake of the turmoil, Levant has been trying to distance himself from the alt-right movement, saying the term now means “racism, anti-Semitism and tolerance of neo-Nazism”, which The Rebel is not, because he is a “proud Jew” and there are people of different backgrounds working for The Rebel. 

But Levant has previously defended a video called “10 Things I Hate About Jews” on the site by then-contributor Gavin McInnes (a co-founder of Vice) earlier this year, saying it wasn’t anti-Semitic. Goldy, the contributor who was sacked, carved out a niche with her anti-Islam videos, like this one called “Nice try, BBC: Niqabs are not normal!” and this one “More Muslims = More violence“. The Rebel also employs Tommy Robinson — founder of far-right anti-Islam protest group the English Defence League — as its UK correspondent. 

It’s only recently that Canadian politicians have started to distance themselves from the The Rebel. The leader of the conservative opposition party Andrew Scheer appeared on Goldy’s program earlier this year, but has since said he won’t do so again with its editorial direction.

When Latham announced the partnership, he said Rebel Media was “an impressive, very professional international group that strongly opposes political correctness, social engineering and divisive identity politics”.