Facebook and Twitter users voiced their frustration, whilst the BBC admitted that several of its primary systems, as well as backups, simply failed to operate.
In a blog posting, Steve Herrman, editor of the BBC news portal said that normally backup systems would kick in, as his team has planned ahead for these types of outages.
"It appears the websites went offline when some of the essential equipment that we use to direct people to the site – known as routers – failed. These routers not only act as the main funnel for all traffic coming into the site but also 'broadcast' the location of BBC Online so that it can be 'found' on the internet", he said about the incident.
"But, in an unusual turn of events, these also failed meaning that the whole of BBC Online became unavailable. A number of internal services were also affected", he added.
Infosecurity notes that the outage started just after midnight UK time on Tuesday evening, meaning that most iPlayer users were already in bed.
However, despite this, Twitter was flooded with annoyed users of the BBC iPlayer service including, interestingly enough, users in North America who – because the service is normally blocked for non-UK free users – were apparently using proxy services.
Richard Cooper, the BBC's head of digital distribution, meanwhile, said that the outage was caused by a failure in the systems that perform two functions.
"The first is the aggregation of network traffic from the BBC's hosting centres to the internet. The second is the announcement of 'routes' onto the internet that allows BBC Online to be 'found", he said in his own blog posting.
Paul Mutton, a security researcher with Netcraft, said that the traffic patterns around the BBC's portals were normal just prior to – and following – the outage, confirming the BBC's assertion that the problem was technical in nature and not a DDoS attack.
"It did not look like a DDoS. It was a very abrupt outage. Usually there will be an increase in request times [to a website] before a DDoS. Traffic patterns to the BBC site were not typical of an attack"" he said in his own posting on the event.