The problems began about 0700 GMT and meant visitors to the site saw an error message rather than webpages.

Sources within the BBC said the sites were offline thanks to what is known as a "distributed denial of service" attack.

An earlier statement tweeted by the BBC laid the blame for problems on a "technical issue".

In the message the corporation said it was aware of the ongoing trouble and was working to fix it so sites, services and pages were reachable again.

At midday it released another statement saying that the BBC website was now "operating normally".

"We apologise for any inconvenience you may have experienced," it said.
The BBC has yet to confirm or deny that such an attack was responsible for the problems.

-BBC