British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has said that its main news web portal and other sites went offline due to a cyber attack on Thursday.
According to News.com.au, the service was offline for more than three hours.
Users received an error message and the broadcaster said on Twitter that the outage was due to technical problems.
A BBC spokesperson later aplogised for the inconvenience caused by users and said that the website was back up.
A news story posted on the website said it had been due to a "distributed denial of service" attack in which a website is swamped with more traffic than it can handle.
