BBC iPlayer outage worse than Netflix Christmas blackout

The BBC has admitted that some of their services including the iPlayer faced major technical problems since the weekend, and there is still no resolution.

The outage, which began on Saturday morning has affected millions of viewers who watch the iPlayer, or browse the main BBC website.

It was only today that the homepage of the BBC News site was finally restored, while the iPlayer reportedly faces further glitches.

Netflix experienced a major outage when its VOD services went down on Christmas eve. The bad-timing was damaging for the service's credibility during the busy holiday season in the US, but recovered soon after.

In retrospect, the BBC's iPlayer outage is more prolonged, with viewers complaining that they haven't been able to access certain shows over a period of several days, which has undermined the service's good track record.

It is not yet clear what caused the glitches, but a news report released today on the main BBC News site said that:

"The problems for the iPlayer and many other sites started on the morning of 19 July when engineers noticed that there was a "severe load" on the servers underlying the video-on-demand system….messages were also received from network engineers at internet service providers (ISPs) including Virgin Media, which were also logging problems with the iPlayer and other BBC video traffic."

Was this a major technical failure or were BBC services intentionally overloaded with specific network attacks? A statement will be released later regarding the incident according to the report.