The Greater Manchester police website in the United Kingdom was taken offline by a denial of service (DoS) attack. DoS attack is when large numbers of computers are made to access a website at the same time in order to overload it and force it offline. Later, a Twitter account in Lithuania claimed responsibility for the event. Website was unavailable for visitors for some time, but the force restored it shortly afterwards and tweeted that there had been some “technical issues” that had now been resolved.

However, after this message website went offline the second time. Moreover, an anonymous Twitter account holder @n0w1337 tweeted the force and claimed responsibility for taking the website down and demanded that the police acknowledge it was a hacker attack rather than technical problems. @n0w1337 said they were tweeting from Lithuania and demanded the police to tell the truth about the attack, otherwise hackers wouldn’t have stopped there.

By the way, it looks like the Greater Manchester police were not the ones to suffer from this hacker: the same account holder also claimed responsibility for taking down the websites of Manchester city council and Manchester airport. However, it is unknown whether those websites were inaccessible.

The police said they treated the issue as a denial of service (DoS) attack – in other words, a malicious attempt to disrupt services. They also reassured people that there was nothing to worry about, because the server for the website wasn’t connected to any other force system and stored only publicly available information. The police also apologized for any inconvenience and promised to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.