Technical problems plague BBC sites

21 July 2014
Last updated at 12:39

The BBC’s flagship iPlayer service has been hit by technical problems that started over the weekend.

The catch-up service has been only intermittently available as a result.

Faults have also meant only a simplified version of the BBC’s homepage can be shown, while online video and audio clips have also been disrupted.

The problems have been designated a “major incident” and work is being done to stabilise related databases.

“We are working hard to try and fix it,” said a BBC spokesman.

He added that the corporation was still investigating the root cause of the problems.

Internal investigation

The corporation put out statements via Twitter apologising several times for the inconvenience the problems were causing.

The apology did not mollify many people who strongly criticised the BBC about the length of the disruption.

The problems for the iPlayer and many other sites started on the morning of 19 July when engineers noticed that there was a “severe load” on the servers underlying the video-on-demand system.

In addition, reports reached the BBC that viewers were getting slow response times for some services or were seeing errors saying a programme or clip was not available.

Soon after the BBC noticed, messages were also received from network engineers at internet service providers (ISPs) including Virgin Media, which were also logging problems with the iPlayer and other BBC video traffic.

Later in the day, the service became unavailable via the web and through smartphone apps.

Internal logs of the incident and how it was handled showed that database administrators, network engineers and system analysts were all called on to see if they could diagnose the problem and fix it.

Work continued throughout the weekend to try to stabilise the servers and database supporting the iPlayer and many other BBC services.

The final fixes for the problems were expected to be applied on 21 July when the vast majority of people should be able reach the web-based video services as normal.

The BBC said it would issue a statement when it knew more about the cause of the glitches.