The legislative arm of the European Union – the European Commission – has confirmed that it has been the victim of a hacking attack with officials at the institution losing internet access for "several hours".
The Commission is one of the key bodies of European policy making but employees saw their work disrupted during Thursday afternoon due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
"The Commission was the target of a large scale denial of service attack," a spokesperson told CNBC via email on Friday.
"The attack has successfully been stopped with no interruption of service although connections speeds have been affected for a time yesterday. No data breach has occurred," the spokesperson added.
A DDoS attack is when an internet service is intentionally overwhelmed by traffic from lots of sources. It is a common method for digital assaults.