NSA website hit by technical glitch, not hackers

The website of the US' National Security Agency was reportedly down for several hours as a result of an apparent technical glitch and not due to a speculated hack-attack.

The NSA said that its website was not accessible because of an internal error that occurred during a scheduled update, which will be resolved immediately.

The spy agency further clarified that the claims that the outage was caused by a distributed denial of service [DDoS] attack are not true, ABC News reports.

According to the report, the website was down for at least six hours and an agency spokesperson said that the agency's internal, sensitive network was not compromised and no classified information was at risk.

However, one hacktivist group online claimed that they were responsible for bringing down the NSA site with a sophisticated DDoS attack.

The NSA has been long battling with the allegations of breaching public trust after revelations about the alleged secret surveillance programmes as exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.