(Bloomberg) -- Israeli government websites went offline Monday, and the country’s cyber agency declared a state of emergency to study the extent of the damage, according to Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, citing an unnamed defense official. 

The websites of the prime minister and the ministries of interior, health, justice, welfare were affected. The spokeswoman of the Israel National Cyber Directorate couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Gil Messing, spokesman for Israel-based Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. said it was “very probable” the sites were hit by a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack. Such incidents typically involve outside attackers directing waves of inauthentic web traffic at a single website, temporarily rendering it inaccessible. 

“While it is loud and visible, it actually doesn’t cause significant damage other than sites not working, and many have bounced back,” Messing said of DDoS attacks. “This is usually done to send a message and create a lot of buzz. It isn’t necessarily an infiltration or grabbing of information.”

Website outages also occur for more innocuous reasons, such as cloud service interruptions or other technical issues. 

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