#BBCDown: Cyberattack takes Beeb offline, internet goes hysterical

Hackers brought down the BBC’s internet services on Thursday in what the broadcaster described as a “large web attack.”

The BBC suffered an intermittent internet services outage on the morning of New Year’s Eve that took down its website, the BBC iPlayer and the bbc.co.uk domain. 

BBC News online initially blamed the outage on a “technical issue,” but later quoted sources within the corporation who said it was due to a “distributed denial of service” (DDOS) attack.

The BBC itself has yet to confirm or deny that such an attack was responsible.

DDOS attacks aim to shut down a website by swamping it with more traffic than it can handle.

DownDetector.uk, which records website outages, received its first reports of the BBC website being down at 0700 GMT.

According to BBC News, the website was largely back online by 1030 GMT, although some pages were still taking longer to load.

Twitter users poked fun at the BBC when its internet services went offline, with some speculating it was the sign of an impending invasion.

As the hashtag #BBCDown began trending on Twitter, users thought the loss of BBC online could only mean one thing: the end of the world.