The BBC said that its main news website and other online services were taken down on Thursday by a large web attack.
The service went down at 7.00 GMT and was out for more than three hours on Thursday.
Users received an error message and the broadcaster said on Twitter that the outage was due to technical problems.
The BBC website is down – this is the first sign of the apocalypse right? #Error500
— Dai (@DaiTheBay) December 31, 2015
According to Reuters:
The broadcaster itself reported it had been hit by a “distributed denial of service (DDoS)” attack, citing sources within the organisation. DDoS attackers typically target sites by flooding servers with messages from multiple systems so they are unable to respond to legitimate traffic.
The BBC press office said it would not confirm or deny it had been hit by an attack.
“We’re aware of a technical issue affecting the BBC website and we are working to fix this now,” the BBC press office said.
It said at 1145 GMT its sites were back up and operating normally.
The BBC are onto their IT department about their website being down. pic.twitter.com/m1jqDeDAh5
— Colin Bestford (@Colin_B_1970) December 31, 2015