Hackers managed to paralyse China's top search engine on Tuesday, causing Baidu.com to temporarily shut down.

Officials have claimed Baidu was shut down in a cyber-attack by a group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army.

Hackers blocked access by pushing web traffic over to another Web site, where users were informed that services had been interrupted due to external manipulation.

While there is no evidence the hackers are actually linked to Iran, a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army also shut down Twitter last month.

Baidu is the dominating force in China's Internet and surpasses Google as a search engine.