BBC Under Cyberattack: BBC iPlayer And Other Websites Go Down In 2015’s Last Prominent Hack

Anu Passary, Tech Times 01 January 2016, 07:01 pm

2015 ended on a not-so-positive note for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) after a cyberattack left all its websites unavailable.

On Thursday, Dec. 31, hackers took down BBC's websites, rendering several of its services, such as the iPlayer, down for several hours.

According to BBC journalists, their company suffered a Dedicated Denial of Service or DDoS attack on Thursday morning. For the unfamiliar, a DDoS attack basically means that hackers flood a server or site with malicious traffic so that it crashes under the heavy load.

The attack on New Year's Eve, described by BBC as "outrageous" and "apocalyptic," led its sites, including the iPlayer Radio, to go offline. The web pages would be inaccessible and site visitors were instead welcomed with a 500 error message.

Users first encountered the problems at 7 a.m. GMT and BBC then reported the technical glitches on Twitter and assured users that it was working on sorting out the issue and would update users once the pages and services are functional.

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, 2015

It took the broadcaster close to four hours to sort out the problem, and at midday BBC tweeted that its websites were "operating normally" and apologized to users for any inconvenience.

The BBC website is now back up and operating normally. We apologise for any inconvenience you may have experienced. — BBC Press Office (@bbcpress) December 31, 2015

Even though BBC's sites and services were back by 10:30 a.m. GMT, some indexes and pages were taking longer than usual to load.

Interestingly, a report by BBC says that the downtime was owing to the DDoS attack. In the same breath, it said the broadcasting company did not acknowledge that a DDoS attack was responsible for its services becoming inaccessible for a short period.

Rory Cellan-Jones, a technology correspondent with BBC, cited unknown sources and confirmed via a tweet that BBC had indeed been the victim of a DDoS attack.

Sources - BBC suffered a DdOS - a distributed denial of service attack. But services are now being restored — Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) December 31, 2015

The BBC websites and services going down created a furor among social media users who were unable to catch up on iPlayer programs. Nevertheless, some people made fun of the incident.

"iPlayer isn't working and all I have downloaded is a few episodes of Mrs Brown's Boys and the Queen's message," complained a user on Twitter.

"The #bbc website is down. The end of the world is nigh. And more importantly, my morning routine has now been spoiled," ranted another.

"#BBC website down. Did it indulge too much over the festive period? @Catchpoint," tweeted a user. It is not clear who were behind the attacks and the motive.

This was not the first time that a cyberattack caused BBC's sites to crash. In July 2014, the iPlayer went offline for a weekend after a fault developed in the database of the on-demand TV service. No one has taken responsibility for the DDoS attack on BBC but here are some of the memes and jokes after the outage.

Meanwhile BBC technical team #BBCdown pic.twitter.com/ZB0Ke9oYcB — Suhaib Malik (@suhaibmalik) December 31, 2015

And another one...

How to tell the #weather the good old fashioned way, now the #bbcdown #firstworldproblems pic.twitter.com/ThEnwpyrKJ — Chris Paton (@mrchrispaton) December 31, 2015

And more trolling...