The organizing committee for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics said Thursday the home page of the games' official website was inaccessible for over 12 hours from Wednesday night due to a cyberattack.
"We think we suffered a cyberattack. It is an extremely serious issue," Toshiro Muto, director general of the Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games told reporters.
According to the committee, its home page could not be viewed from around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday to 9 a.m. Thursday because a company operating the server cut off the system after detecting an attempt to overwhelm the server with traffic.
The incident came after the Tokyo Metropolitan Government said on Oct. 27 that it would step up measures to deal with cyberattacks by launching an organization next year to take charge of information-gathering and training.
The 2012 London Olympics website was also attacked.