The official websites of the Taliban, who swept to power in Afghanistan on the back of a lightning offensive last week, appeared to have vanished from the internet late on Friday.

It was not immediately clear whether a technical fault or something else was to blame.

The Taliban operate separate websites in Pashto, Dari, Arabic, Urdu and English. All five appeared to be unreachable on Friday.

A spokeswoman for CloudFlare, which online records list as providing protection for the Taliban sites, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The outage was first reported by The Washington Post.