The BBC’s websites were knocked out of action for several hours this morning, apparently because of a hackers attack.

Corporation technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said there had been a distributed denial of service which happens when groups of computers are used to bombard a network with traffic.

All sites, including the iPlayer, were offline. The BBC said only that there had been a technical issue.

The problems began about 7am and meant visitors to the site saw an error message rather than webpages.

In its message the corporation said it was aware of the ongoing trouble and was working to fix it so sites, services and pages were reachable again.

At midday it released another statement saying that the BBC website was now “operating normally”.

“We apologise for any inconvenience you may have experienced,” it said.

The BBC has yet to confirm or deny that such an attack was responsible for the problems.

By 10.30am the site was largely working again though some pages and indexes took longer than normal to load.

The BBC’s crop of websites have suffered other technical problems in the past. In July 2014, the iPlayer and many of its associated sites were offline for almost an entire weekend.

The fault was traced to a database that sits behind the catch-up TV service.