(The Hosting News) – Imagine not being able to access Google, the internet presence relied upon by a majority of users worldwide. Well, that briefly became a reality for those accessing the web in Ireland, according to a report from Sophos on Tuesday.

So what caused the downtime? The security firm pointed towards a curious change in nameservers maintained by the Irish Domain Registry. Apparently they were incorrectly configured to point to an Indonesian-based website called farahatz.net.

Could the move have simply been a glitch or something of malicious intent?

“Whether this was the result of a malicious hack or an admin screwup is as yet uncertain, but the danger was that if someone bad was responsible for the change they could have potentially taken users to a bogus Google website, and infected them with malware or distributed advertising pop-ups,” commented Sophos in its post appearing on the Naked Security blog.

A variety of online users took to Twitter to express dismay regarding the incident. Meanwhile, an account belonging to Extratime.ie News suggested a workaround for Irish users. “Use http://google.co.uk instead of http://google.com or google.ie if you are in Ireland – the DNS has been hacked it would appear,” read the statement.

Nameservers play a critical role in routing online traffic to proper internet presences. In August of last year, a hack on SSL authority DigiNotar leaked Google-related certificates on the web. Google later worked to update its Chrome web browser to secure the matter.

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