A network failure that brought down the government login service DigiD on Tuesday afternoon was caused by cyberhackers.

Logius, the organisation that manages the service, confirmed its servers had been paralysed by a large-scale DDoS attack that prevented users from accessing its services for more than five hours.

DigiD is the main login mechanism used for Dutch government services such as the tax office, local government offices and the SVB, which pays out benefits, as well as health insurers, education finance and pension providers.

Logius said the attack targeted several services simultaneously with an “exceptionally high” volume of internet traffic. DDoS attacks work by bombarding servers with requests from thousands of different locations to create a bottleneck in the system.

“Although our day-to-day system is normally well set up to deal with attacks of this kind, the scale and range of this attack made several Logius services temporarily inaccessible,” a spokesman said.

The operator is investigating the source of the cyberattack.