BBC senior editors apologised last night after the corporation’s website went offline for almost an hour.
A series of technical problems resulted in BBC.co.uk being unavailable for users until just before midnight.
Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC news website, said in a blog post: “It’s not often we get a message from the BBC’s technical support teams saying, ‘Total outage of all BBC websites’.
“But for getting on for an hour this evening, until just before midnight, that’s what happened.
‘We haven’t yet had a full technical debrief, but it’s clear it was a major network problem.
“We’d like to apologise to everyone who couldn’t get onto the BBC News website during that time.”
In January, the BBC confirmed that 360 staff jobs would go as part of cuts to its annual online budget of around £34m.
The 25 per cent cut to the annual online budget of £137m would see the number of websites it provides fall from around 400 to around 200.
The cuts will see the BBC reduce staff working online by around 23 per cent from the current 1,600 total by 2013.
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