Government websites across ministries, including the Prime Minister's Office, suffered outages this evening that were attributed to "malfunctioning" and not a cyber attack.

The PMO website, along with those of the Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha and key ministries such as finance and defence, were not accessible for a few hours this evening.

While the Press Information Bureau's website remained down, the department said in a Twitter message: "Govt clarifies that there was no cyber attack or hacking of Govt websites. Due to malfunctioning of some equipment, some sites were down."

It said services would be restored soon, although no time line was given. Officials of the National Informatics Centre, which hosts the websites, said they were looking into the matter. The officials said the websites encountered some technical glitches because of which they became inaccessible.