BBC website and iPlayer offline after faults

BBC internet services have suffered a number of glitches with parts of the main website becoming unavailable for a time.

The BBC's iPlayer catch-up service also went offline, while a section highlighting the most popular stories of the day featured old items.

It is not clear whether the problems are related and engineers said they were still investigating the cause.

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 BBC's front page still proved problematic over the following hour.

A statement from the BBC said: "Due to a major technical issue, BBC Online was temporarily down on Wednesday evening. Service was restored to most users within an hour. We are working on full restoration as quickly as possible, and are investigating the causes of the outage."

At the same time the Most Popular section continued to show a mix of both new stories and items dating from 11 June including "Apple ditches Google Maps in iOS6" and "Camerons left daughter at pub".

In an earlier tweet the BBC News website's editor, Steve Herrmann, had acknowledged the issue: "Working to fix issue of old stories showing in 'Most read' list on @BBCNews site. We're sorry and hope to fix soon."