A cyber attack has left tens of thousands of Post Office and Talk Talk broadband customers without internet this week.

The assault, which uses the same malicious software that took some of world's most popular websites offline in October, has been ongoing since Sunday and intermittently affected the customers' ability to connect to the internet, the companies said.

The Post Office said around 100,000 of its customers had been affected since Sunday. Talk Talk meanwhile did not say how many of its broadband subscribers were hit, but confirmed that a minority were affected on Thursday. Both companies are working on a fix.

As well as Talk Talk and the Post Office the attack hit Hull's internet provider Kcom, and left 900,000 of Germany's Deutsche Telekom customers unable to connect to the internet earlier this week.