A number of Government websites have been down this morning

A number of Government websites were down this morning.

It is thought the websites have been brought down by a DDoS attack.

A Distributed Denial Of Service is when a website is bombarded with requests and becomes overwhelmed.

DDoS attacks generally do not involve theft of data.

The websites affected include the Central Statistics Office, The Department of Justice, the Courts Service and the HSE.

The sites are now back up and running.