BBC down: Website but not iPlayer stops working amid major outage

People were shown a remarkably traditional error message

The entire site apart from iPlayer stopped working (PA)

The BBC website has stopped working for users across the country.

Many parts of the site – including News, Sport and other sections, though not iPlayer – went offline, according to users.

Instead, users only saw a remarkably traditional 500 error, which plays on the error message that shows when BBC TV stops working.

"We’re aware that some people are having problems accessing some parts of our website," the BBC press office tweeted. "We’re trying to fix this as soon as possible."

Many of the BBC's followers used the opportunity to jokingly or seriously attack the organisation's news coverage.

Others joked about the fact that it is often said that the captains of Britain's nuclear submarines will know that something has happened to the country if Radio 4 goes silent for a number of days. It is not clear whether that old story is true – and the radio and TV broadcasts were unaffected by the online outage.