BBC website sent offline due to web attack
All BBC websites went offline for almost three hours this morning after a reported web attack.
According to a report on the BBC tech website, the outage was due to a ‘distributed denial of service’ attack. This means a surge of traffic is sent to a website that it cannot handle, causing it to crash or become patchy.
The website went offline at around 7.00am on 31 December 2015 until it came back online at 10.30am. The BBC said in a statement that it was a ‘technical fault’ and is yet to make any formal comments on whether it was indeed an attack, or who was responsible.
The responses to the website going offline were instant and sizeable on social media, since it is a rare occurrence for the company's sites to be out of action.
According to the article, the last time the BBC website went down it was for an entire weekend in July 2014. The fault originated in a database linked to the catch-up TV service and caused most of the BBC sites to crash, including the iPlayer.