The attack is said to have occurred on Wednesday evening.

The Together For Yes campaign, who are campaigning for a Yes vote in the upcoming Eighth amendment referendum, have claimed that their crowdfunding website crashed on Wednesday, May 9 following a cyber attack which originated from within Ireland. A spokesperson for the campaign released for the following statement:

"A Together For Yes crowdfund initiative was shut down yesterday evening for 30 minutes after the company hosting the website was attacked by an unknown Irish-based entity. "The attack took place at 5.45pm, which would ordinarily be a peak time for donations. "The company which hosts the crowdfund webpage, Causevox, confirmed to Together For Yes that it experienced a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack from within Ireland, which momentarily disrupted internet service and brought down its entire global platform."

Investigation over shutdown on Yes campaign webpage https://t.co/FPOK4iKw1f via @rte

— Together for Yes (@Together4yes) May 10, 2018

Causevox also hosts crowdfund webpages for Amnesty and Terminations For Medical Reasons. Sarah Monaghan, Together For Yes spokesperson, said:

"We are continuing to investigate this extremely serious incident and are actively consulting security experts in the field to help identify the specific source of the attack, and have made a report to Gardai. "Together For Yes is a national grassroots movement which relies on small donations from large numbers of people. Our crowdfund initiative is a core element of the manner in which we resource our campaign and therefore we would take extremely seriously any attempt to undermine it."

This follows on from this week's news in which Google confirmed they will be blocking ALL ads related to the referendum from Thursday 10 May, and Facebook has banned all Eighth Amendment-related ads from advertisers based outside Ireland.