All BBC websites out of order last night, but why?

The BBC’s online portfolio experienced an unprecedented outage last night, with all of the broadcaster’s websites inaccessible from between 11pm and midnight.

Twitter was alight with users complaining about the failure, the biggest outage since the BBC.co.uk homepage went down for 15 minutes in August 2010.

“It’s not often we get a message from the BBC’s technical support teams saying, ‘Total outage of all BBC websites’,” read a Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC news website, blog post.

“But for getting on for an hour this evening, until just before midnight, that’s what happened. We haven’t yet had a full technical debrief, but it’s clear it was a major network problem.

“We’d like to apologise to everyone who couldn’t get onto the BBC News website during that time.”

While the blog post states an innoccent technical fault, that hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorists from claiming the outage was due to both a DDoS attack, or to do with the recently announced financial cuts to the BBC online sector.