The Times of Malta website was down for several hours yesterday after the site experienced a sudden increase in requests in what could have been a cyber attack.

At about midday the site experienced a denial of service attack

At about midday the site experienced a denial of service attack that is usually associated with a malicious attack on a website, explained timesofmalta.com’s development manager of web services Darren Gordon.

“We cannot be 100 per cent sure that we were attacked before we go through all the logs.

“But, at the moment, our priority is to get the website up and running,” Mr Gordon said when contacted yesterday evening.

A denial of service attack, he explained, occurred when a website was suddenly inundated with requests to access the site.

Usually, he said, a team of developers monitored the site and could predict if the number of requests was increasing. They then increased server capacity accordingly. However, in this case, the sudden surge did not allow for such action.

Mr Gordon explained that soon after the denial of service attack was detected, the service provider’s security protocol kicked in and shut down timesofmalta.com to ensure that the rest of its clients would not be affected.

At about 6pm, web technicians managed to put up a new temporary server, on which timesofmalta.com was accessible. As this new server propagated, access to the website slowly started being resumed.

Throughout the day yesterday several readers called Times of Malta’s offices asking why they could not access the site.

A spokesman for Allied Group said: “When an organisation hits such a large audience, both local and international, it becomes susceptible to such attacks. Notwithstanding the number of precautions and security measures in place, it is unfortunate that this organisation has become the victim of what seems to be a directed and concerted cyber attack.”