Still not working at 15:02, and neither is my universities online learning environment, so I might just have a cup of tea, far better than actually doing work!

My browser is reporting that "the redirection limit for the URL has been exceeded".

On the bright side, El Reg is still working :-)

Been dipping in and out of the BBC news site all day - it's only now I've had problems - but only the UK version.

"and using Solaris too !!!!"

.. and no indication of course that the Solaris servers are the problem, could be app software, finger trouble etc.

I like it. The BBC have good breadth in their coverage but a chronic lack of depth.

@Emj: agreed, it's a great site for testing browsers on embedded devices.

BBC news site seems to be up and running at an old IP address:

http://212.58.226.20/

You can still go to the news sections via the BBC homepage and navigate around from there, it's just the News Front Page that's not working.

Could it be anything to do with the new (and somewhat ugly) tabs that have appeared at the top of the page???

Shurely even the Beeb can't mess up the addition of some graphics to a header....

A few (best part of seven or eight) I had a tour of the old BBC R&D centre at Kingswood Warren. As part of this they showed us teh server rooms whithing which resided all BBC News/Sport etc websitey stuff... The nice man told us that there was a mirror site hosted in London (I forget where), so in the event of any misshap or errors, they could immediatly switch to the mirror and roll-back to before any coding problems (or bybass any hardware ones)... not sure if that is still the case...

And yes, sod the news, it's a poor shadow of its former self and to quote someone else on El Reg this week, 'Kaplinskiated' but I was trying to access the sports and that was very slow...

They could probably afford it if they got rid of Jonathan Woss. Sorry, Ross. Get rid of Humphries and a couple of the other doddering old fools and they'll be able to pay twice the going rate!

The BBC makes something close to 4 billion a year from the telly tax, and another couple of billion from international sales of its back-catalogue yet, like any publicly funded organisation it always seems to be short of money. The problem, as always, is to be found lurking in the layer upon layer of administrators, managers, line-managers, overseers, executives, assistants, assistants assistants, house managers, floor managers, health and safety managers, lawyers and other middle-management cruft that always gathers in public institutions. The answer is simple. Fire the lot. Get rid of the failing digital channels, get rid of the unnecessary management layers and give Ross and his compatriots a well-deserved pay cut.

T'isn't happening though. Instead we've got the BBC chasing ratings. Ratings! It's a public service broadcaster, not a popularity contest! They're cutting the news and docuemntaries budget in order to expand their digital channels and re-organise as some sort of international comglomerate. How is that even justifiable given their charter obligations?

BBC sold off BBC Technology to Siemens as Siemens Broadcasting Services under an outsourcing deal a couple of years ago.

I was briefly a contractor there and can tell you the BBC has some good staff and some real wasters. Server support contactors handled 25 calls per day each on average, permies did 4. I was introduced to the concept of 'Walkers'. Staff it would be difficult to get rid of, so they aren't assigned any work and the walk around chatting to their mates and visiting one of several bars at Television Centre.

www.bbc.co.uk/newsnight

403? Yeeeeerrrrssssss.....

It was down last night @23.00ish, it's still down, now.

...has magically reappeared after redirecting itself. Still, two 403s 22 hours apart can't be good. (Yes, yes, my cache was clear!)

So where did El Reg get it's stories from today? Yeah, I'm gonna be banned, aren't I?

The good people at Netcraft have more on this outage, and a little bit more on the Akamai connection.

I haven't checked lately, but it used to be the case that the IP address you got when you looked up www.bbc.co.uk (or was it news.bbc.co.uk) depended on which ISP you were with, thus enabling some form of simple geographic load balancing (ie if your ISP is in the US, you get a "BBC" address which is the BBC's server farm in NYC, so your data doesn't have to be shipped all the way from BBC UK). Or something like this.

Not sure what happens to this scheme if you're using OpenDNS.

(Apologies if this appears multiple times, El Reg itself was briefly inaccessible when I submitted this. Honest.)

...to do was reboot...! As for Solaris what a load of rubbish...get yourself Windows 1.0 running IIS 0.01

The BBC is that glorious geriatric Institution that still runs on a combination of intuition and what the words sound like ... remember the "little Lions" on the eggs, well that is still news if you run out of Yokes!