Hackers attacked the website of a French magazine this month, attempting to sway an opinion poll on the Beijing Olympics and change the site’s content, its publisher said on Wednesday.

Jean-Joel Gurviez said the website of business magazine Capital was first hit in March, when it opened a poll on whether France should boycott the Games’ opening ceremony in China.

“On the first day, we had about 300 responses, which was normal for this type of poll, and they were 80 percent in favour of a boycott. The next day there were 20,000 responses, with 80 percent opposing a boycott,” he said.

Almost all of the responses arrived via Chinese servers, Gurviez said, leading technicians to initially think the influx was driven by Chinese sites directing patriotic fans to vote.

“But a few days later we had hackers operating off servers in China try to change our content, and there were 2.5 million attempts to access protected files. We had to shut down the site temporarily,” he said.