大象传媒 website and iPlayer offline after faults

Image caption, The 大象传媒's homepage could not be reliably accessed for more than an hour

The 大象传媒's internet services have suffered a number of glitches.

Parts of the main website were unavailable for more than an hour on Wednesday. The 大象传媒's iPlayer catch-up service also went offline.

The broadcaster said the problem was caused by a failure at its data centres, adding that it was still investigating the root cause of the incident.

It follows a similar hour-long outage in March 2011.

The latest failure caused the site's contents to become inaccessible shortly after 20:00 BST.

Although sections of the site, such as bbc.co.uk/news/technology were back online by 21:00, attempts to access the 大象传媒's front page still proved problematic over the following hour.

Traffic managers blamed

A post on the 大象传媒 Internet Blog said that services had been fully restored by 22:10 after an issue involving its computer servers had been addressed.

"The problem was caused by a failure of the traffic managers in both our data centres," <link> <caption>wrote Richard Cooper</caption> <url href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/07/website_outage_june_11_2012.html" platform="highweb"/> </link> , controller of digital distribution at 大象传媒 Future Media.

"These traffic managers are a critical part of our infrastructure, responsible for handling all requests to the site, and routing those requests to the right servers. They are designed to be highly reliable, and have served us very well to date.

"We are still investigating the root cause of this incident, and I would like to apologise for any inconvenience that this outage may have caused."

The fault coincided with another issue that caused the 大象传媒 News' sites Most Popular section to include month-old stories on Wednesday.

These included "Flooding and storm warnings across England" and "Camerons left daughter at pub" prompting some users to click on the stories again.

The 大象传媒 News website's editor, Steve Herrmann, <link> <caption>had acknowledged the issue</caption> <url href="https://twitter.com/大象传媒SteveH/status/223032897446227968" platform="highweb"/> </link> in a tweet sent before the site went offline: "Working to fix issue of old stories showing in 'Most read' list on @大象传媒News site. We're sorry and hope to fix soon."