Updated

The Dutch government's website is down and authorities say they are investigating the cause.

An employee of the Ministry of General Affairs said the outage began at around 9:45 a.m. (0845 GMT) Tuesday and had not been resolved by early afternoon. The employee declined to be named because he was not an official spokesman.

He says the problem appeared to be at the company that hosts the government website, Prolocation, and that other sites the company hosts also were down. Prolocation could not immediately be reached for comment.

The last major outage at the government's site, in May 2013, was caused hackers launching a so-called denial of service attack.