A botched plan to hijack consumer routers caused a massive disruption of Internet service in Germany. Hundreds of thousands of users were reportedly unable to access the web over the weekend because of the disruption.

Close to a million Deutsche Telekom customers were affected by the service outage. Users started reporting slow and sometimes unresponsive Internet service on Sunday and the outage persisted until Monday. The German telecommunications company said that the attack was originally intended to turn smartphones and other devices into bots creating a wide network of zombie devices called botnets.

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According to Reuters, the outage affected users in several German cities including Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Dusseldorf, and Stuttgart. No hacking group has claimed responsibility for the attack. On the other hand, German authorities are also working with Deutsche Telekom to determine the perpetrators of the hacking attack.

In a statement acquired by CNet, Deutsche Telekom said, "The attack attempted to infect routers with malware but failed, which caused crashes or restrictions for 4 to 5 percent of all routers. This led to a restricted use of Deutsche Telekom services for affected customers."

The telecommunications firm said that it is working on a patch to fix the vulnerability and prevent future attacks. The company also released an advisory asking customers to disconnect their routers from a power source and reboot them to get rid of the malware.

This is the second time that Deutsche Telekom has been targeted in a botnet attack. The first attack was in October when hackers employed distributed denial of service (DDoS) tactics to render popular websites completely inaccessible. The hackers distributed malware to turn millions of Internet-connected devices like computers, smartphones, and routers into a massive botnet which was then used to perpetrate the attack.