BBC Website Crashes For An Hour

Technical problems with the BBC website saw a complete outage of the headlines site, iPlayer and other web services yesterday.

The intrusion lasted for around an hour on Tuesday evening.

BBC bosses certified that there had been a "major network problem" caused by multi-part systems and their backups failing.

The outage set Twitter land with upset fans doubt how such a relapse happened.

In a blog posting , Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC headlines website apologised is to network failure.

Mr Herrmann wrote: "Normally this would not result in any problems as you outline for events similar to this and run backup equipment. But, in an out of the ordinary spin of events, these moreover failed, meaning that the entire of BBC Online became unavailable. A number of inner services were moreover affected."

The BBC's coordinator of digital placement , Richard Cooper, explained that the complaint lay with the way users are destined to BBC websites: "For the more technically minded, this was a disaster in the systems that perform two functions.

"The initial is the assembly of network traffic from the BBC's hosting centres to the internet. The second is the statement of 'routes' onto the internet that allows BBC Online to be 'found'," he wrote.

Some users, essay online, have speculated that the site had been theme to a large distributed rejection of service (DDoS) attack.

Typically, hackers will collision a website's servers by swamping it with requests, often from computers that have been hijacked using rouge software.

The BBC mentioned that, at this stage, there was no denote that the disaster had been caused by such an attack.

Paul Mutton, a safety assistant professor at Netcraft, mentioned that traffic patterns around the BBC site right away before and after the outage referred to that it was down to a technical failure.

"It did not look similar to a DDoS. It was a really quick outage," he explained.

"Usually there will be an enlarge in solicit times [to a website] before a DDoS. Traffic patterns to the BBC site were not conventional of an attack," mentioned Mr Mutton.