Ireland’s largest ISP Eircom has confirmed that there was a domain name server (DNS) outage on its website last night after users complained they were being redirected to bogus sites, leading to speculation the company’s server has been hacked.

The company so far has not issued a statement on the extent of the outage or if indeed it was hacked. A statement is due shortly.

Users last night posted threads on Boards.ie that they had been experiencing serious DNS slowdowns and odd occurances such as when visiting Facebook or RTE.ie they would be redirected to sites showing pictures of scantily clad women or advertising pages.

Typically, users reported sites acting normally, but certain pages were refusing to load.

The problem is understood to have first manifested itself at the weekend.

At the time of writing, an Eircom spokesman confirmed that it has had issues with its servers and that a statement would be forthcoming.

By John Kennedy