Greater Manchester Police website hit by denial-of-service attack

Greater Manchester Police's (GMP) website was attacked on Wednesday, the force said.

The site was unavailable for more two hours from 20:00 BST in a "malicious attempt to disrupt services", GMP said.

Deputy Chief Constable Ian Hopkins said they were treating it as a "denial-of-service attack" and apologised for any inconvenience caused.

A person has claimed responsibility on Twitter for causing the website crash, a GMP spokeswoman said.

Det Ch Con Hopkins said the force's website server was not connected to other police computer systems and contained only information which was already in the public domain.

"We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible," he said.

Those carrying out a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack flood their target with large amounts of traffic in an attempt to render their website unreachable.