iiNet broadband customers in New South Wales were hit with long service interruptions on the weekend, as the provider was smashed by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

An iiNet representative explained told an online forum that the outages were “due to a large volume of external traffic directed towards iiNet Group service”.

No more details have been provided as to where the attack came from, or its true volume.

iiNet is remaining fairly silent, but has conceded that unnamed problems meant many customers were unable to access websites, check email, and that some Netphone customers were unable to make or receive calls.

Reports say the DDoS took out iiNet's Domain Name System (DNS) servers, with customers reporting that they could connect using Google's free public resolvers.

The apparent DDoS came just days after iiNet's broadband in NSW and 3G data services nationwide were knocked out by an unspecified hardware fault.