Router failure shut down BBC websites

FAILED ROUTERS were the cause of the hour long total outage of the BBC's websites earlier this week, Blighty's national broadcaster has revealed.

Despite having backup routers, the BBC found that they also failed, ensuring that no one could access Aunty Beeb's wide range of content from sports coverage to low fat cooking recipes.

The problem occurred between 11pm and midnight on 29 March, with the BBC's webpages failing to load. The outage caused many, like us at The INQUIRER, to suspect a possible distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which is a common tactic used by hackers to overload a website's bandwidth.

Steve Herrmann, news editor of the BBC Online said, "These routers not only act as the main funnel for all traffic coming into the site but also 'broadcast' the location of BBC Online so that it can be 'found' on the internet."

Herrman's colleague Richard Cooper, who has the job title controller for digital distribution for BBC future media, also blogged apologetically explaining that the website was back to its full self by 0400 hours. Good for all those wanting early morning low fat snacks we think. µ