BBC Suffers Total Website Outage
The BBC admitted that most of its websites went offline in an incident described as a ‘major network outage’
The BBC has admitted that most of its websites experienced a outage on Tuesday evening, following a “major network outage”.
Writing in a blog posting, Steve Herrmann the editor of the BBC News website, admitted the scale of the outage, which happened late on Tuesday evening between 11pm and midnight and reportedly caused a total outage of the BBC News site, as well as the BBC iPlayer and other web services.
Major network problem
“It’s not often we get a message from the BBC’s technical support teams saying, ‘Total outage of all BBC websites’,” Herrmann wrote. “But for getting on for an hour this evening, until just before midnight, that’s what happened. We haven’t yet had a full technical debrief, but it’s clear it was a major network problem.”
“We’d like to apologise to everyone who couldn’t get onto the BBC News website during that time,” he added.
Users trying to get on to the BBC website on Tuesday evening were confronted with an error message, showing the BBC’s iconic test card.
The BBC did not provide a fuller explanation of the outage, it has nevertheless led to speculation that the outage was triggered by outside forces, with some on message boards speculating that the BBC had crossed swords with the Anonymous group.
On Twitter, speculation also ran from the serious, such as an Anonymous attack, to the more tongue in cheek, with speculation that because of the Coalition government cuts, the BBC is only operating a three day week.
Routing issue
However a fuller explanation was offered by the BBC’s Richard Cooper, on the BBC Internet blog.
“As many of you will have noticed (and reported on Twitter) the whole of BBC Online was down last night for an hour from 22:40 due to a major network incident. We would like to apologise to everyone that was unable to access BBC Online during this outage,” wrote Cooper.
“Our systems are designed to be sufficiently resilient (multiple systems, and multiple data centres) to make an outage like this extremely unlikely,” he said. “However, I’m afraid that last night we suffered multiple failures, with the result that the whole site went down. Enough of the systems were restored to bring BBC Online pretty well back to normal by 23:45, and we were fully resilient again by 04:00 this morning.”
“For the more technically minded, 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!,” he wrote. “We’ll be taking a very hard look at what we need to do to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
This is not the first time that outages have affected BBC websites however, with similar incidents reported both in August 2010 and November 2009.
Online Budget Pressures
The outage comes as the online unit of the BBC faces up to budget cutbacks. In January, unions reacted angrily to the BBC’s decision to slash its online budget by 25 percent, and cut hundreds of jobs.
Overall, the BBC’s online budget is set to be reduced by 25 percent to £103m by 2013, and a total of 173 of the 400 individual BBC sites will be closed by the end of this year with another 30 to follow.
Online news is to see its budget cut by 13 percent, from £26m to £22.6m
