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The BBC website collapsed under the strain of the attack.
The British broadcasting company was apparently subjected to a DDoS ("Dedicated Denial of Service") attack. This involves flooding a website or server with malicious traffic, crashing it under the load.
With access to the right tools, it's a fairly simple attack to carry out, and requires little technical expertise. DDoS "stresser" tools are even available online that anyone can use for a fee.
Thursday's DDoS attack took down the BBC homepage and its on-demand streaming service iPlayer, The Guardian reported. The outage occured between 7AM and 10.30AM, according to the BBC.
The BBC is reporting that the downtime was the result of the "large web attack" - although it bizarrely also says the "BBC has yet to confirm or deny that such an attack was responsible for the problems."
On Twitter, BBC technology journalist Rory Cellan-Jones has also blamed a DDoS attack, citing unnamed "sources."
Sources - BBC suffered a DdOS - a distributed denial of service attack. But services are now being restored
- Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) December 31, 2015The BBC had previously blamed the outage on a "technical issue."
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) December 31, 2015It's not yet clear who the culprit is.