BBC hit by widespread outages taking services offline.
A widespread outage hit BBC’s website and associated online services on Thursday which was believed to be caused by a kind of web attack known as “distributed denial of service” (DDoS), according to a report by the BBC.
The outage started at around 0700 GMT Thursday morning, affecting the main website and associated services including the main iPlayer catch-up service and iPlayer Radio app.
By 1030 GMT, the main site resumed operation. The BBC released a statement at midday saying its website was “operating normally.”
In an earlier statement, the public service broadcaster said the outage was the result of a “technical issue”. But a later news report by the BBC quoted sources within the organization as saying that the websites were offline due to what is known as a DDoS attack.
DDoS attack is a technique that aims to knock a site offline by swamping it with more traffic than it can handle.
Jean G. Thomas
