BBC reports own websites hit by cyber attack

The BBC’s websites were unavailable for part of Thursday morning – and BBC journalists say it was due to an attack by hackers.

The problems began about 0700 GMT and meant visitors to the site saw a message informing them about an “internal error”.

In the message the corporation said it was aware of the ongoing trouble and was working to fix it so sites, services and pages were reachable again.

The nation’s biggest broadcaster is officially blaming the outage on a “technical issue“, but sources inside the BBC are reportedly being told it was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.

For the BBC, the loss of its web services is a blow: the company has invested considerable money into its interactive and streaming services, which are accessible outside the United Kingdom through advertising and purchase fees and account for considerable income.

The BBC seemed to suffer a New Year glitch a little early in 2015, with the broadcaster citing “technical issues” as its vast online presence went down on Thursday morning.

“The BBC website is now back up and operating normally”.

“We apologise for any inconvenience you may have experienced”, it said. No known hacking group is thought to have claimed responsibility for the outage. “According to most people on Twitter, the BBC website being down is basically all four horsemen of the apocalypse come at once”, the Guardian’s Technology Editor Jonathan Haynes wrote.