The BBC website was subjected to a DDoS attack on Thursday evening (November 6) that crippled the website’s performance significantly.

During the attack, the BBC website responded very slowly, and our monitoring shows that for a total of 1 hour and 15 minutes it did not respond at all. The downtime was spread over multiple short intervals, lasting just a few minutes each time.

The attack lasted the entire evening. It started to have an effect after 5 p.m. CET and the performance was not back to normal until after 10 p.m. CET.

Analyzing the response times of the website clearly shows the effect the DDoS attack had on the performance of the BBC website. The diagram below shows the hourly average load time of the HTML page (just the HTML page, without any images, external scripts, etc).

The faster load times after 10 p.m. are most likely due to the fact that BBC put up a simplified version of the web page during the attack to better handle the increased load. The simplified page was left in place overnight in case the attack would resume.

All monitoring data in this article is taken from the Pingdom uptime monitoring service.

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