Off the wire
• LME base metals close lower mostly on Thursday  • News Analysis: IS getting weaker, but may increase attacks on West in 2016  • U.S. stocks extend losses ahead of New Year's Day  • Singapore welcomes New Year in drizzle  • Four nations to meet on Afghan peace talks on Jan.16  • Greece prepares to welcome 2016 with cold spell, relief measures for refugees, homeless  • Syrian anti-aircraft targets Lebanese helicopter  • China police target prostitution, gambling in New Year crackdowns  • China opens direct military phone links with Vietnam, ROK  • Londoners to pay half mln pounds for new homes in 2016: report  
You are here: 　 Home

Web attack reportedly takes BBC websites offline

Xinhua, January 1, 2016 Adjust font size:

A widespread outage hit BBC's website and associated online services on Thursday which was believed to be caused by a kind of web attack known as "distributed denial of service" (DDoS), according to a report by the BBC.

The outage started at around 0700 GMT Thursday morning, affecting the main website and associated services including the main iPlayer catch-up service and iPlayer Radio app.

By 1030 GMT, the main site resumed operation. The BBC released a statement at midday saying its website was "operating normally."

In an earlier statement, the public service broadcaster said the outage was the result of a "technical issue". But a later news report by the BBC quoted sources within the organization as saying that the websites were offline due to what is known as a DDoS attack.

DDoS attack is a technique that aims to knock a site offline by swamping it with more traffic than it can handle. Endit