Irish discussion forum Boards.ie is back online following a cyber attack, which brought the site down for three days.

The online forum had been a battling distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack since Sunday, which has the effect of bringing a site down by swamping it with more traffic than it can handle.

In a DDoS attack, the attackers targets sites by flooding servers with messages from multiple systems so they are unable to respond to legitimate traffic.

The cyber attack was confirmed by Boards.ie on its Twitter page.

On 18 January: it wrote: “We’re experiencing a ddos attack on site at the moment; we’re doing our best to mitigate the effects and will be back online asap.”

On its website yesterday, Boards.ie wrote: “We’ve been under a sustained DDoS attack since Sunday (17/01/’16) evening and we’re working really hard to deal with it since then.”

Boards.ie was shortlisted for the title “Most Influential Irish Site Ever” in the Web and eCommerce awards last year.

The website is owned by Distilled Media, the company that runs the Daft property website.

On New Year’s Eve, the BBC’s entire network of websites and its iPlayer streaming service were the subject of a DDoS attack. Thousands of users took to social media to complain after being met with an error message when they visited BBC sites.

A group of computer hackers that wants to target Islamic State, also referred to as Isis, claimed it was behind a cyber attack on the BBC which it intended as a test of its own capabilities.

“It was only a test, we didn’t exactly plan to take it down for multiple hours,” the group called New World Hackers said in a message sent to the BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, which he posted on Twitter.