The New Zealand Couriers website was the victim of a ‘denial of service’ botnet attack late last week, believed to be from overseas.

The ‘denial of service’ attack, which took place on Thursday November 7, was specifically aimed at preventing access to www.nzcouriers.co.nz and the online tools hosted on this page, and required intensive and malicious effort by an unknown group.

Revealed through a customer email sent out by the company, NZ Couriers wrote: "We have sorted out the issues caused by this attack for the most part.

"But there are some important pieces of information we wanted to make you aware of:

• You may experience a longer wait time than usual when contacting our call centre, due to more people doing things over the phone that they would usually do through our website.

We would encourage you in the first instance to try using our online tools as usual before calling through to book a courier, buy product, or track an item.

• The issue was caused by a malicious attack, but no one who visits our website is at any sort of risk – this is not related to viruses or anything along those lines.

• Traffic to www.nzcouriers.co.nz has been restricted to New Zealand and Australian based companies – so if you have a customer outside of this region, or if your company runs an offshore system then they may not be able to access this website.

If this occurs, we do have a way to resolve this – simply contact us on 0800 800 841 and we’ll get the details from you required to sort this out.

Admitting that there may be "some lingering issues over the next few days," NZ Couriers claims these are likely to be sorted out within the next week.

"New Zealand Couriers apologises for this interruption of service and we will continue to do everything in our power to deliver the same great service you have come to expect from us," the company email concluded.

Did you have trouble with the NZ Couriers website last week? Tell us your experiences in the comments below