The Iranian internet service has suffered hours of disruption in what telecoms authorities say was the result of DDoS cyber-attack that was dealt with swiftly.

A senior telecoms ministry official said that a “powerful” distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that began 11:54 a.m local Iranian time on Saturday caused users to experience connection issues.
Sajjad Bonabi said that the attack had affected several service providers in Iran, including two notable mobile operators.
He said in a post on Twitter that the DDoS attack was dealt with immediately using the Iranian Information Technology Fortress, known as DEJFA.
“Through an intervention by DEJFA and cooperation of colleagues in Infrastructure Company, the communications are now in a normal condition,” said Bonabi who himself is the deputy head of Iran’s Telecommunication Infrastructure Company.
The official later posted another tweet saying that a last service provider affected by the attacks had reported normal conditions later on Saturday.
DDoS attackers normally use hijacked or virus-infected computers to target websites. During such attacks, websites become unreachable after an unusually large number of requests for information are sent to them, causing the servers that host them to fail.
Officials have yet to elaborate on the origin of the attacks and whether they had been motivated by political objectives. 
Twitter sources close to the communications ministry said the spoofed IP addresses from which the “highly distributed attacks” had been launched were from East Asia and North America.
Iran has previously reported cyber attacks sponsored by the United States and the Israeli regime that has targeted its key information infrastructure.
DDoS attacks in September targeted Iranian websites that were involved in cryptocurrency trade. Authorities said those attacks were 20 times more powerful than similar attacks in other countries.