BBC website goes down on New Years Eve, spreads panic

People who woke early on New Year’s Eve hoping to catch up on the news in Britain were met with the dreaded “500 error” message when they tried to access anything on the BBC website.

According to Mashable, a BBC News story stated that a “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) web attack technique had taken down its website and restricted its functions.

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The Corporation is yet to confirm or deny that such an attack was carried out on its website, but stated around midday that the site was operating normally and apologized for the inconvenience, according to the Mashable report.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack yet, as at press time.

The BBC site was down from sometime around 7am GMT to 10:30am GMT and in that time thousands of Brits woke up – and panicked.

See tweets on the website going down below:

Even Stephen Fry joined in on the action.