The BBC's online services, including its news website and iPlayer catch-up TV platform, were taken down on Thursday by a large web attack, the British broadcaster said. The web sites were hit from 0700 GMT, with many users receiving an error message rather than content.

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

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

"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 1145 GMT its sites were back up and operating normally.