The websites of the defence ministry, home, law and labour ministries crashed this evening around the same time, which raised suspicion that these had been hacked. But a top cyber security official emphatically denied any hacking and blamed the snag on a hardware problem.
First the defence ministry's official site started leading to an error page and had a Chinese symbol thought to mean "Not early". Moments later, the home, law and labour ministry websites were down.
"The site is currently not available because of technical problems. Please try again later. Thank you for understanding," said a message on the home website, informing that the site was offline.
It was initially thought to be a case of hacking, especially after a tweet from Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, but a cyber security official countered it.
Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tweeted to say that her ministry's website will be restored shortly.
Sources said the National Informatics Centre, which maintains all government websites, was asked to investigate.
The glitch also comes on a day the government - in fact on another part of the Defence Ministry website - officially released the Request for Information (RFI) for more than 100 new fighter jets in a deal eventually expected to cost upwards of a 100,000 crores.
Earlier this year, the government informed the Lok Sabha that over 700 websites linked to the central and state governments were hacked in the past four years.
With inputs from IANS
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