The BBC website and iPlayer service went down on December 31th morning following a major cyber attack raising panic on the social media.

The cyber attack started at 0700 GMT when all the visitors to the site started seeing an error message.

Thousands of users complained on social media after seeing the error message, and the problems continued for around an hour before the situation was fully restored.

An earlier statement tweeted the British Broadcasting Company informed the readers about the problems caused by a “technical issue” and confirmed that the company was already working to solve it.

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. — BBC Press Office (@bbcpress) 31 Dicembre 2015

The technology correspondent at the British Broadcasting Company, Rory Cellan-Jones, tweeted:

Sources – BBC suffered a DdOS – a distributed denial of service attack. But services are now being restored — Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) 31 Dicembre 2015

At midday, the BBC Press Office informed the readers that the websites were “operating normally”.

The BBC website is now back up and operating normally. We apologise for any inconvenience you may have experienced. — BBC Press Office (@bbcpress) 31 Dicembre 2015

The British Broadcasting Company confirmed that the DDoS attack also affected iPlayer Radio app and iPlayer catch-up service.

Who is behind the attack?

At the time I was writing there are no news regarding the attack or possible responsible.

“DDOS is a blunt form of attack which takes volume and not skill. It’s a very basic attack tool. One analogy is too many people trying to get through a revolving door at the same time so that the door gets stuck.” said a National Crime Agency spokesperson.

This isn’t the first incident suffered by the British Broadcasting Company, exactly in the same day in 2013, Russian hackers known as “HASH” and “Rev0lver” took control of a company server and attempted to sell access to it to other cybercriminals.

Stay tuned.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – BBC, DDoS attack)

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