BBC Websites taken by DDoS attack

It was reported that BBC websites on early Thursday morning were taken down for around 3.5 hours due to a large cyber attack.Starting at around 2 a.m. ET users who visited the affected websites saw an error message instead of the actual webpages.By 5:30 a.m., the sites were largely working again, though some pages were slow to load.

In a tweet about two hours after the attack began, the BBC said it was aware of the problem and blamed the shutdown on a "technical issue." The broadcaster later published a news story revelaing that it was the victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack which affected main BBC news site as well as the main iPlayer catch-up service and iPlayer Radio app.

At 6:47 a.m., the BBC tweeted that its websites were back up and running normally.

"We apologise for any inconvenience you may have experienced" , the broadcaster wrote.

For the uninitiated, DDoS attacks aim to flood a website with so many requests that regular traffic is either slowed or completely interrupted.

Meanwhile, the BBC isn't the only prominent company to suffer a DDoS attack in recent days.Gaming company Valve this week revealed it was the target of a Christmas day DDoS attack, which led to a breach of about 34,000 Steam Store users personal information.