Hackers in California attacked several of the Russian government’s websites over the weekend, Russian officials said on Monday, just as the country was trying to conduct elections.

“Someone attempted to hack our website and alter the data there, making 50,000 requests per minute,” said Vladimir Churov, chairman of the Central Election Commission of Russia, according to a report in the state-funded Russia Today. Such an attack is known as a distributed denial of service, which is designed to crash a website.