Dutch government website outage caused by cyber attack

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Cyber attackers caused the outage of Dutch government websites and a prominent satirical news portal for most of Tuesday, a Dutch government official said on Wednesday.

The outage affected most of the central government's main websites but phones and emergency communication channels remained online.

Other websites, including GeenStijl.nl, which mocks politicians and religions, were also hit by the "distributed denial of service" attack, Rimbert Kloosterman said.

"Our people are investigating the attack together with the people from the National Centre for Cyber Security," said Kloosterman, an official at Government Information Service, which runs the websites.

The attack affected the network of hosting provider Prolocation, which could not immediately provide details. The outage began at 0900 GMT (5pm Singapore time) on Tuesday and lasted for more than seven hours.

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