A HACKER from Lithuania caused Greater Manchester Police's website to crash last night. 

The force's official site went down at 8pm, with a Twitter user from Lithuania claiming responsibility for it crashing. 

The site was down for about 20 minutes, and officers said initial checks revealed nothing untoward and the system was quickly brought back online.

Police are now treating the incident as a "malicious denial of service". 

What the hacker is accused of is a Distributed Denial of Service, which involves many users accessing a site and overloading it. 

It is being reported that the hacker claims his attack was committed to "show the failure of security in these large systems". 

A tweet from the GM Police Twitter account read: "Few technical issues with http://www.gmp.police.uk over the last 20 minutes" before saying it was 'back up and running'."

However, a short time later the site went down again with a Twitter user from Lithuania claiming responsibility for causing the website to crash.

The tweet using the handle @n0w1337, responded to the force, saying: "I think these problems responsible was me :)." He then said: "@gmpolice Again I will leave this site offline."

The Manchester Airport website has since also been down with a further tweet from the same account reading: "Official website for Manchester Airport #Offline http://www.manchesterairport.co.uk by @n0w1337 & @g0d1337"

Deputy Chief Constable Ian Hopkins said: "We are treating this as a denial of service attack, which is a malicious attempt to disrupt services.

"I want to reassure people that the server for the website is not connected to any other force system and that the information contained on the website is all public information.

"We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused to members of the public and we are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible."