BBC website down, iPlayer is also offline

The BBC's main news website has gone offline, with users reporting that the site is totally inaccessible.

The outage has also affected the BBC iPlayer. Currently when visitors try to log on to the site they are presented with an Internal Server 500 error.

Visitors wishing to view any BBC Content will discover content pages not loading or delayed loading in other sub-category sections. Mobile users have also reported problems.

It is unclear what has caused the sudden outage of one of the world's largest news sites, which became inaccessible around 11am local time. Users on Twitter in the UK and France have so far reported not being able to access the BBC.

There is no official word from any of the corporation's Twitter accounts about the issue.

Update:

The BBC's error 500 pages are now offline as well.

The site was briefly online at 11.57am with broken page elements

BBC News has become accessible, with most content pages back online, however the main BBC homepage is still down. (11.59am)

The BBC Press office has released a statement regarding the outage of the iPlayer and BBC News sites - 9.48pm