The Brighouse branch of global construction company Saint Gobain is believed to have fallen victim to a worldwide cyber attack.

The attack is causing mass disruption across Europe and this afternoon Saint Gobain confirmed to French newspaper Le Parisien it had been affected.

The Examiner contacted the Brighouse site and was told the communications department was unavailable due to the 'error'.

The Ukraine appears to have been heavily affected, with 'serious intrusions' reported at the Ukrainian power grid, banks and government offices, where one senior official posted a photo of a darkened computer screen and the words "the whole network is down".

Ukraine's prime minister said the cyberattack is "unprecedented" but "vital systems haven't been affected".

Companies in Russia, Denmark, Copenhagen, Holland and Romania have also reported outages.

There is very little information about who might be behind the disruption at each specific company, but cybersecurity experts rapidly zeroed in on a form of ransomware, the name given to programs that hold data hostage by scrambling it until a payment is made.

"A massive ransomware campaign is currently unfolding worldwide," said Romanian cybersecurity company Bitdefender.

It said the malicious program appeared to be nearly identical to GoldenEye, one of a family of rogue programs that has been circulating for months.

It is not clear why the ransomware has suddenly become so much more potent.

The world is still recovering from a previous outbreak of ransomware, called WannaCry or WannaCrypt, which spread rapidly using digital break-in tools originally created by the US National Security Agency and recently leaked to the web.