The BBC's online services, including its news website and iPlayer catch-up TV platform, were taken down this morning by a large web attack, the British broadcaster reported.

The BBC's sites, which rank only behind Google and Facebook in visitor numbers in Britain, according to Internet analytics firm comScore, were hit from 8am, with many users receiving an error message rather than content.

The broadcaster itself reported it had been hit by a "distributed denial of service (DDoS)" attack, citing sources within the organisation.

DDoS attackers typically target sites by flooding servers with messages from multiple systems so they are unable to respond to legitimate traffic.

The BBC press office said it would not confirm or deny it had been hit by an attack.

"We're aware of a technical issue affecting the BBC website and we are working to fix this now," the BBC press office said.

It said at 12.45 pm its sites were back up and operating normally.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.