Ireland's largest internet service provider Eircom is blaming hackers for its second bout of recent downtime.

Eircom customers could not get online for much of yesterday evening, although the firm said full access was restored from 11.15pm.

Yesterday's problems were due to unusually heavy traffic, which sounds like a DDoS attack to us.

The company told us the problems were "related to an unprecedented volume of traffic deliberately directed at our network, which has caused difficulties for customers over recent days... Eircom has been in contact with other operators in the Irish market to collaborate and pool technical expertise in this area."

A spokesman for the company said it was a denial of service attack on its domain name servers. He said: "We normally get about four million requests every five minutes - during attacks this went up to eight million."

He said there had been a few attacks in recent weeks, and the company did not where they were coming from or why they were being singled out for attack.

Thanks to Owen and Ross, among others, for mailing us about this. There's more in this forum thread. ®

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