Whisky Auctioneer had been selling what was labelled as The Perfect Collection - 4000 bottles featuring some of the world’s rarest and most expensive whiskies.

The auction was the second of two organized by Whisky Auctioneer to sell the collection, which featured around 1900 bottles.

It included the current world record holder, a bottle of Macallan Fine and Rare 1926 that sold for $1.9 million in 2019.

The site went down just before the official end of the second auction which was held on April 20th, Forbes reports. 

Initially, Whisky Auctioneer announced that it was having trouble with the servers, and would extend the auction deadline until April 22nd with the site restored.

This quickly became unfeasible as the site went down once more. In a statement released to Whisky Auctioneer members, founder Iain McClune wrote: “As you may know, we were victims of a sustained Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on Monday 20 April 2020 causing significant disruption to our service, but with no evidence of data compromise as a result of this specific attack.

“Despite our immediate response with actions to protect against this occurring again, a further targeted, technically sophisticated, sustained and malicious attack occurred, potentially resulting in unauthorised access to a limited quantity of our data. This compromise occurred at around 22:30 (BST) on 21 April 2020.”

Police Scotland’s fraud and cybercrime unit is currently investigating the case and the Whisky Auctioneer website remains down at the moment, with a single page announcing the indefinite postponement of the auction.