Saturday, March 14, 2015

BBC website down due to "technical problems"

The BBC website went down on Saturday afternoon with reports that the site could not be accessed from many locations around the globe.

The reason for the outage was not immediately clear but came as surprise to many people who took to Twitter to express their opinion with some describing it as "amazing". Speculation mounted as to the reason for the outage with many people believing hackers were responsible according to a poll on the Daily Mirror website. Indeed only 3 days earlier the hacking group Anonymous threatened to bring down the website if Jeremy Clarkson wasn't reinstated following his suspension from the programme Top Gear after a 'fracas' with a producer [Daily Mirror].

The site showed the once familiar testcard image  showing a clown and an "Error 500" alongside a statement that the site might be down because  of "abnormal traffic" to the network or that "the service or servers it is on is not currently available".

The BBC would only say they were experiencing technical difficulties. "Apologies, as we are experiencing technical problems on the BBC News website. We are working hard to resolve the issues," the organisation tweeted. However some Internet users also noted that other BBC web services were unavailable including the BBC iPlayer which could not be resolved on Android devices.

The website went down shortly after 13:00 GMT but some services returned to normal for some users with the hour.

For the BBC website to go down is relatively rare. The last time the site went down for any significant period of time was in July 2012 [Telegraph].

tvnewswatch, London, UK

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