Oops
The BBC's news website, iPlayer and other services crashed for an hour last night due to a ‘major network problem'.
Bosses at the Beeb admitted the problem was caused by several systems and their backups failing, the BBC reported.
With Twitter full of angry users unable to access Auntie's sites, Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC news website wrote a blog post apologising for the system failure.
"Normally this would not cause any problems as we plan for events like this and run backup equipment. But, in an unusual turn of events, these also failed meaning that the whole of BBC Online became unavailable. A number of internal services were also affected," he said.
Auntie's controller of digital distribution, Richard Cooper told the website that the problem was to do with the way users are directed to the sites.
He reportedly said: "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."
While speculation is rife that the sites were targeted by a huge DDoS attack, the Beeb has apparently said that there is no indication that this was the case at this stage in their investigations.
A security researcher at Netcraft called Paul Mutton, reportedly said that the traffic patterns around the Beeb's site before and after the outage suggest that the crash was due to a technical failure.
"It did not look like a DDoS. It was a very abrupt outage. Usually there will be an increase in request times [to a website] before a DDoS. Traffic patters to the BBC site were not typical of an attack," he apparently added.
