Paris-based music service Deezer reports that users' data is safe after it was taken down by a hacking attack over the weekend.

The site, a streaming music service that competes with companies such as Spotify, was hit by two distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Friday and Saturday.

"The first small attack was detected on Friday morning, but it did not impact the service," the company said in an email to users. "On Saturday 7th June, at 4pm GMT a large scale attack via a botnet (a group of compromised computers controlled by the attacker) resulted in a downtime of several hours."

While some DDoS attacks are aimed at forcing services to reveal personal data, Deezer says that the attack didn't target user information, and only affected whether or not the service was actually available.

The company says that users personal information "has been, and will remain, completely secure".

A DDoS attack involves sending requests from multiple computers – often tens of thousands are involved – to one server, in an effort to overwhelm it with traffic. Because of the low costs and lack of risk involved, such attacks are favoured by "hacktivist" groups.

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