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BBC WEBSITES WERE brought down by a ‘large cyber attack’, the public service broadcaster said.
Visitors to the website started experiencing problems from around 7am this morning, and also affected the BBC iPlayer.
The broadcaster’s press office had initially described the problem as “technical issue”, and apologised for any inconvenience caused.
BBC Press Office / TwitterWe're aware of a technical issue affecting the BBC website and are working to fix this now. We'll update you as soon as we can.
— BBC Press Office (@bbcpress) December 31, 2015
However BBC News reports that the downtime was due to a distributed denial of service attack.
This involves sending a massive amount of traffic to a website from several sources, overloading its servers and leaving the the website inaccessible.
Although the website is back online, the effects of the attack are still apparent, with pages failing to load correctly and some users still reporting problems with iPlayer.
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Nobody does it better than the BBC.
Many try but fail.
Just a shame that it’s up and running again.
poor Ella mustn’t have much going on in her life
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