The Romanian-language version of Google has not been accessible for many Romanian users for several hours on Wednesday following what a report called a DNS poisoning attack. Google has said its services in Romania were not attacked, but that for a short period of time some Google.ro and other web services users were redirected to another website. For a while in the morning, the users could see the Google.ro interface replaced with a message from an "Algerian hacker".

The Yahoo.ro website was also "down" for a short while on Wednesday morning, according to news agency Mediafax, which quotes go4it.ro website.

Google said their services were not affected directly and that they were keeping contact with the organisation responsible with the domain name administration in Romania.

Some users could access Google.ro without a problem.

The attack did not target pages and their real content, but DNS servers which read accessed web address and direct them to real IP addresses. In a DNS poisoning attack, false information is delivered to other DNS servers and is thus propagated to users, allowing attackers to redirect traffic to a server they are running.