BBC says New Year’s DDoS attack knocked its website offline

BBC’s main news website and other sites were knocked offline Thursday morning in what the publishing giant has called a web attack.

According to BBC officials, its websites went down for more than three hours as a result of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attacks are often used by hacker groups to bring down websites by flooding the site with requests until its servers are overloaded and crash.

“We’re aware of a technical issue affecting the BBC website and are working to fix this now. We’ll update you as soon as we can,” read a statement tweeted by BBC’s press office Thursday.

The website has since been restored.