Updated An online chat with the heir to the Dutch throne was abandoned after hackers launched a denial of service attack.

The interactive event was expected to attract a few thousand people at most, but received three billion hits as soon as Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and fiancee Maxima Zorreguieta went online.

PC screens froze and, with little other choice left, the event was cancelled, today’s Daily Telegraph reports.

A political motive was initially suspected in early reports (including ours) of the attack. Maxima Zorreguieta's father was Jorge Zorreguieta, a minister in Argentina Junta of 1976-83 during who's rule an estimated 10,000 people "disappeared".

It now seems the attack was directed in order to embarrass KPN, the Dutch carrier.

Dutch newspaper, De Telegraaf has reported that the attack was claimed by the "Down Under Crew" (DUC), a hacking group based in the Netherlands. One of DUC's members told the newspaper that there was no political agenda, but rather that the attack was directed at KPN and was meant to "teach it a lesson".

Before the chat, KPN (which is resented for recently raising the price of ADSL in the Netherlands by 25 percent) claimed that everything would go well and there would be enough bandwidth available to service all parties interested. This raised hackles among the hacking community.

A DUC member claimed they used 3,000 computers in the DDoS attack of a total of 10,000 hacked machines available to them, De Telegraaf reports.

Another theory (backed up by the idea that 3 billion requests would seem to be a questionably high figure) is that KPN’s systems failed and it blaming hackers as an excuse.

The marriage takes place on February 2.®