BBC’S WEBSITES CRASH

The BBC’s entire network of websites went offline for nearly an hour last night, Britain’s Press Association wire service said today (Wednesday). Shortly before midnight, Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News website, posted a message on Twitter saying, “We are having technical problems … They are being looked into urgently. Apologies.” When the sites became active again, he posted this message: “It’s not often we get a message from the BBC’s technical support teams saying, ‘Total outage of all BBC websites.’ 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 apologize to everyone who couldn’t get onto the BBC News website during that time.” PA noted that in January the BBC announced plans to cut 360 jobs and close websites as part of a “more streamlined approach.”