The BBC has blamed a "major network problem" for bringing down all its websites late last night. The issue resulted in all online services, including its iPlayer platform, going offline for around an hour.
Writing on the BBC’s blog Steve Hermann, editor of the BBC news website, said: "It’s not often we get a message from the BBC’s technical support teams saying, ‘Total outage of all BBC websites’. 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."
"We’d like to apologise to everyone who couldn’t get onto the BBC News website during that time," Hermann added.
Social network sites such as Twitter were soon awash with users suggesting the site had been the target of a cyber attack. However a BBC employee wrote on Twitter: "It’s not a DoS attack. routing went away. software config or hardware problem."
Early this morning Richard Cooper explained the outage on the BBC’s blog: "Our systems are designed to be sufficiently resilient (multiple systems, and multiple data centres) to make an outage like this extremely unlikely," he wrote. "However, I’m afraid that last night we suffered multiple failures, with the result that the whole site went down. Enough of the systems were restored to bring BBC Online pretty well back to normal by 23:45, and we were fully resilient again by 04:00 this morning."
Cooper added: "For the more technically minded, this was a failure in the systems that perform two functions. The first is the aggregation of network traffic from the BBC’s hosting centres to the internet. The second is the announcement of ‘routes’ onto the internet that allows BBC Online to be ‘found.’ With both of these having failed, we really were down! We’ll be taking a very hard look at what we need to do to make sure that this doesn’t happen again."
In January this year the broadcaster announced it would be cutting its online budget by £34m or 25%, which could result in the loss of up to 360 jobs and the closure of up to 180 of its websites.
