BBC Web Properties Go Down
The BBC website went offline tonight, including the iPlayer and other web properties.
Twitter has been all a buzz this evening with people shocked that the BBC’s web properties have become inaccessible all around the world.
There has been comment from the BBC’s various twitter users but nothing that indicates a reason, just comment that it has. Although the BBC also runs 24/7 TV news channels there has, at the time of writing, been no mention there either. In fact they are still heavily advertising the BBC website and email addresses.
The fact that such a large, important and stable web property is suffering downtime is leading many tweets to suggest that the end of the world must be close, that something is not quite right in the world.
It is going to be interesting to discover the cause, could it be a hack that some are suggesting or is there a more innocent reason?
I remember working for a company that suffered an outage in a similar vein and the reason?….. The cleaner had unplugged the equipment to plug in a vacuum cleaner.
[ UPDATE: BBC Website is back & accessible again. According to Richard Cooper, controller of the BBC's digital distribution, the infrastructure suffered multiple failures.
"This was a failure in the systems that perform two functions. The first is the aggregation of network traffic from the BBC's hosting centres to the internet. The second is the announcement of 'routes' onto the internet that allows BBC Online to be 'found.' With both of these having failed, we really were down!
We'll be taking a very hard look at what we need to do to make sure that this doesn't happen again." ]
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