Web-hosting company Irish Domains was the target of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Friday, incapacitating numerous websites of its client companies.

The company said that it had seen “a significant slowdown” on several services following the DDoS attack, whereby an online service is made unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources.

The company said the slowdown was affecting email and web for some sites, adding that it “had experienced a 30x increase in inbound network connections”.

“We are implementing some countermeasures to divert unwanted traffic but we expect disruption to service to continue for another while,” Irish Domains said.

Brightwater Recruitment and Sherry Fitzgerald were among the companies that use the web hosting services services of Irish Domains and thus experienced issues with their sites.

There are two types of DDoS attacks: a network-centric attack which overloads a service by using up bandwidth and an application-layer attack which overloads a service or database with application calls.