Telstra suffered outages to its internet services over the weekend which it linked to cyber attack, before realsing it was not.

The telco initially said its widespread internet outage was caused by a denial of service (DoS) attack, causing significant disruption. The outage hit home internet connections, including NBN.

Telstra initially said in a statement on Twitter that its DNS infrastructure was targeted by a “cyber attack, known as a denial of service (DoS)”.

“We're blocking the malicious traffic attacking some of our services,” it said in a separate statement just after midday AEST.

“We are confident we have blocked all of this malicious traffic and are working to get you back up and running again.”

Telstra's own Network Outage internet pages were impacted too, which meant many affected customers learned about the outage through social media.

When services were back to normal, the company posted on Twitter.

“The massive messaging storm that presented as a denial of service cyber-attack has been investigated by our security teams and we now believe that it was not malicious, but a domain name server issue,” the company said.

“We're really sorry for getting in the way of your weekend plans.”