BBC explains hour-long website outage

The BBC's entire web estate fell offline last night for around an hour, following what the Corporation described as "a major network incident". Readers of the site complained about the late night outage on Twitter, with many pumping out various conspiracy theories about what had gone wrong. Some solemnly suggested that Auntie …

[EddieD]

Still not bad...

To be fair to the beeb, and the mountains of our cash that they spend on vanity projects, www.bbc.co.uk has been pretty reliable for the dozen+ years I've been using it - it's the website I use to check that machines have web connectivity when troubleshooting.

No biggy - most sites have occasional outages. And besides, so what. There's nothing really critical on there, kick back, grab a novel, a beer or maybe relax your eyes, or even....find another site with the same info.

[andyb 2]

Stephen Fry explanation

I await the Stephen Fry explanation of this outage

[Anonymous Coward]

I spoke to him earlier

I spoke to him earlier and he said that it was something to do with the BBC's atomic clocks going out of sync. Any more than that, he said that I wouldn't understand because it is, very, very technical.

[Chris Harries]

We will let them have that

Never really had any problems with their web services, and considering its 24/7 365 with big sites such as iplayer which always seam to work flawlessly for me, the fact they went down for an hour is very very good. In fact I'd go as far to say they don't really need to apologies about it

[nigel 15]

For the Technically Minded....?

For the technically minded - think of the internet like a bath full of water, and your computer as a rubber duck floating on.....

is there an explanation for the actually technically minded?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes

The routers that advertise BGP fell over.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fell over?

You sure it wasn't just that the janitor unplugged them when he ran the cleaner in the room?

[Tom Chiverton 1]

How many nines

So that's either a half hour or 5 hour outage, depending on how you measure it. How long will it have to be up continuously for to get back to N nines ?

[Colonel Mad]

Last resort

I thought I had a problem, I even downloaded Safari!

[Bakunin]

re: Last Resort

Well you do now.

[John 62]

gasp

I had to go to another web site to get the score of the England match (2315BST). Needn't have bothered.

though at first I wondered whether they had changed addresses for their news and sport. news.bbc.co.uk now goes to www.bbc.co.uk/news (why?), but sport lives on at news.bbc.co.uk/sport

[Anonymous Coward]

Different CMS's

News runs on the new CMS, Sport on the old. When the new Sport site (eventually) launches it will presumably move to www.bbc.co.uk/sport/

[Optymystic]

The S Word

Don't mention the S word. Apparently it refers to a once reputable German engineering company under whose name a notorious bunch of scheisters and technical numpties are operating and coincidentally running BBC network services. Though why reference to it is prescribed I don't understand. I thought these businesses traded on their reputations

[Anonymous Coward]

technical numpties!

Management numpties possibly, but there are men on the ground that know their stuff, and actually care about their customers, even though said customers sold them up the river so they could build another building, only to sell that and lease it back.

[ph0b0s]

Not just the website

Funnily enough all the BBC TV channels went down at the same time.... But that was to do with digital switch-over in my area. So no apocalypse then...

[Anonymous Coward]

No Problem

All good boys should have been tucked up in bed by then.

[Anonymous Coward]

4am, huh?

So why was I unable to connect at 8am?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sync

Did you try syncing your atomic clock with theirs?

[Rick Eastwood]

Downformeoreveryone.com

I never thought I'd be putting BBC into Downformeoreveryone.com but I did last night. Once that told me it was everyone I smiled a little smile and went to bed.

[T J]

Its a website.....

Its a website, they go down. Get over it. Stop depending on them.

[The Browncoat Cat]

What did they expect?

On the night they showed a new trailer for "Doctor Who" and then put it on line, BBC Online crashes. Well of course it does, what else did they expect? That was bound to cause a huge surge in visitors to their site.