The entire BBC website including iPlayer went off-line this morning after a massive cyber attack, Dailymail reports.

BBC News, iPlayer, live streams of radio and TV stations and the local news sites were among the sites temporarily unavailable for more than three hours during the ‘large and sustained’ attack.

The outage was due to something known as a distributed denial of service attack (DDos). The method sees attackers inundate a specific website with so many requests that it cannot cope with the traffic.

BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said sources had confirmed the cyber attack, but it is not clear who was responsible for it and no known hacking group has claimed responsibility.