BBC Website Taken Down By Massive DDoS Cyber Attack

The BBC has confirmed a cyber attack was responsible for its site going down earlier today.

A tweet from the organisation's technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, confirmed that the site had suffered a DDoS - a distributed denial of service attack.

The BBC published a story soon after, stating: "All the BBC's websites were unavailable early on Thursday morning because of a large web attack."

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DdOS is technique used to crash websites by overwhelming it with too much traffic.

BBC readers and listeners were left in despair today, when the site failed to load at around 7:00AM.

Around three hours later, its press office tweeted: "We're aware of a technical issue affecting the BBC website and are working to fix this now. We'll update you as soon as we can."

In its earlier coverage of the incident, it reported the "fault was traced to a database that sits behind the catch-up TV service."

The BBC press office did not comment on the web attack in their tweet confirming services were "now back up and operating normally."