Hills say website has recovered from effects of cyber attack

William Hill are confident the incident in which a cyber attack caused their website to crash and disrupted service on self-service betting terminals has been resolved.

The firm said they had been a victim of a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, under which a target website is flooded with traffic so it cannot function properly.

The use of self-service betting terminals in Hills shops was also affected during the attack, which took place intermittently over a 48-hour period.

On Wednesday Hills apologised after some customers were unable to place bets during Tuesday's high-profile Champions League games, while the website was also briefly offline on Thursday morning. However, the issue is now believed to be under control.

Speaking on Thursday afternoon, Ciaran O'Brien, Hills group communications director, said: "Our technical team were able to successfully repel the DDOS activity and we've seen normal levels of betting activity on the site today.

"There was some limited impact in retail, where a small number of our self-service betting terminals were impacted, but, again, these have been performing normally today.

"We're back to normal service levels and we thank all our customers for their patience and support."

Hills have not been the first big target of a DDOS attack in recent months as the Twitter, Netflix and The Guardian websites have also been affected.