BBC apologises for mystery service collapse
by Steven Mostyn - Mar 30 2011, 14:17
You can't keep Auntie down. Image: BBC.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has issued an apology to users of its online services after its entire web portfolio mysteriously dropped off the Web last night.
Reportedly brought down due to unspecified technical problems, the official bbc.co.uk website, news site, and even the hugely popular iPlayer platform were all conspicuous by their absence for the best part of an hour.
“It’s not often we get a message from the BBC’s technical support teams saying, ‘Total outage of all BBC websites’,” commented BBC News website editor Steve Herrmann in an explanatory blog post.
“But for getting on for an hour this evening, until just before midnight, that’s what happened. We haven’t yet had a full technical debrief, but it’s clear it was a major network problem.”
Rumours of what caused Auntie’s sudden outage were rife during the time her online services were out of commission, with some reports suggesting a Denial of Service or DNS attack.
Meanwhile, micro-blogging site Twitter played host to speculative tweets pointing to a fresh attack from Anonymous—which has made threats toward the corporation in the past.
None of the above have been either confirmed or denied by the BBC, which has only said it “would like to apologise” to all those users affected by the brief but annoying outage.
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