It's being compared to the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, El Loro!  

Murdoch, Cameron and the Daily Mail; that's three of 'em

That's all that's left of the BBC website. It's in flames.

The beeb still use the clown doll from the old test card i see.

Seems to be working for moi.

Navigating around pages I have not been to before so they are not cached.

EC, the BBC site came back just at the time you were looking at it.

"Technical issues" made the BBC's websites intermittently unavailable on Thursday morning.

The problems began about 0700 GMT and meant visitors to the site saw a message informing them about an "internal error".

News stories and indexes either failed to appear or were occasionally viewable if users re-loaded them.

A statement tweeted by the BBC's press office said the corporation was aware of the issue and was working to fix it.

The problems meant that the main site run by the BBC was unreachable. In addition there were reports on Twitter that the main iPlayer catch-up service and iPlayer Radio app were also not working properly.

Social media reaction was swift. Many urged the BBC to get the site back up quickly and lamented how long it was taking to fix the technical troubles.

By 1030 GMT the site was largely working again though some pages and indexes took longer than normal to load.

In July 2014, the BBC's iPlayer and many of its associated sites were offline for almost an entire weekend. The fault was traced to a database that sites behind the catch-up TV service.

Now, that's one benefit of me sleeping in late. 

Looks as if it was a web attack technique known as a "distributed denial of service" causing the patchy response. This aims to knock a site offline by swamping it with more traffic than it can handle. BBC yet to confirm or deny this.