(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Canada, widely seen as one of the nicest countries on earth, was hit by an "ongoing" cyberattack on Wednesday, according to government officials.

Tony Clement, a member of the Canadian parliament, confirmed on Twitter that servers controlling the government's services had been "cyberattacked."

(Yes, apparently that word can now also be used as a verb.)

According to The Globe and Mail, websites for more than a dozen government departments -- including employment, foreign affairs, labor, and justice -- have been offline, with only "sporadic" access to emails.

The news of Wednesday's cyberattack comes just days after members of the country's House of Commons were told to be on guard amid warnings that its staff had been "targeted" for cyberattacks.

At the time of writing, some websites were returning blank webpages with errors, others did not load, while a few sites were loading normally.

Canadian public safety minister Steven Blaney later confirmed that no personal information "at any point" was compromised by the attack, according to CBC News.

Hacktivist collective Anonymous reportedly took credit for the cyberattack in a video published online shortly after the news broke, citing the country's recent passing of new anti-terror legislation. There's no immediate way to verify the video, however.

The group often uses denial-of-service attacks as a way of overloading servers with data.