Dutch government says 'denial of service' cyberattack took down websites for hours

The Dutch government says a "distributed denial of service" attack was responsible for taking down several of its websites for hours on Tuesday.

In a brief statement, the government said Wednesday that it is investigating who was responsible for the cyberattack.

The last major outage at the government's site, in May 2013, also was caused by a denial of service attack, in which an unknown attacker or attackers try to flood government computer servers with so many requests that they become unreachable for regular traffic.