BBC’s Multiple Websites Suffered Cyber Attack

BBC’s main news website was down for several hours Thursday following an attack. Visitors received an error message and the broadcaster said it was the result of technical problems.

However, the outage was later apologized by British Broadcasting Corporation saying the offline of the main news website as well as other sites were due to a “distributed denial of service” attack, which mean more traffice was sent that was beyond the capacity to handle. Such attack is common to temporarily make websites inaccessible.

According to the UK public service broadcaster, wide range of the websites were attacked and it also affected their iPlayer and iPlayer Radio services. However, the televised news service and live radio serves were not affected and remained on the air.

Immediately after the attack BBC tweeted the blackout of its multiple sites were caused due to a technical issue.

After about three hours when the sites were back to normal the company released a statement to media houses, “We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced..”

BBC is not the first news media to have hit by hackers. The New York
Times website was attacked and temporarily was shut down in 2013. Similar attacks were also seen later for The Washington Post and The Financial Times.