(The Hosting News) – Internet access has been disrupted in Iran, the country’s government recently reported, according to a Reuters news story out today.

The service disruption was apparently due to what a state office described as cyber attacks.

“Yesterday an attack with a traffic of several gigabytes hit the Internet infrastructure, which caused an unwanted slowness in the country’s Internet,” commented High Council of Cyberspace secretary Mehdi Akhavan Behabadi to the Iranian Labour News Agency, a state backed source.

Reportedly of notable target were networks used to operate oil, nuclear and information industries in the middle-eastern country, the Iranian official maintained.

The occurrence itself follows considerable activity involving the country’s internet infrastructure.

Earlier this week Iran unblocked Google’s Gmail service after what it called an “involuntary” ban otherwise meant to assure that citizens couldn’t access YouTube. The popular video streaming site received scrutiny in the middle-east for carrying controversial anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims.

Iran has also been affected by state-launched computer viruses including Flame and Stuxnet in the past. A September report, meanwhile, established that the country could be working to launch its own internet infrastructure, free from outside influence.

The country has tense relationships with western powers who take issue with the Islamic Republic’s developing nuclear program.

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