The website of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has collapsed and the main page merely reads "fatal error" when users were trying to open it after 15:10 GMT. However, users can still browse articles, which had already been published on the website, provided they have a direct link to them.
Following the initial outage, the main page was briefly available at around 15:00 GMT, but afterwards it went down with the "fatal error" once again. The company has not issued any statements regarding website outages so far.
As of 15:20 GMT the BBC website's homepage was operational once again.
The BBC's website has in the past fallen victim to several major cyber-attacks, which resulted in services being unavailable for netizens worldwide for some time. It was famously taken down as a result of a cyberintrusion on New Year's Eve between 2015 and 2016. An anti-Islamist hacker group, New World Hacking, which usually targeted then-active terrorist group Daesh*, claimed responsibility for the cyberattack on the British broadcaster.
*Daesh (also known as IS or ISIS) is a terrorist organisation banned in Russia.