BBC's iPlayer goes offline

The BBC's catch-up service, the iPlayer, temporarily went offline on Thursday for "maintenance".

The outage left surfers unable to catch up with radio and television content from the BBC.

Two different messages of explanation appeared on the iPlayer site.

Initially, a message on the site read: "Our servers are too busy. Please try again later."

However, a later message read: "BBC iPlayer is down for maintenance. We'll be back shortly."

The site came back online shortly after 1315BST on Thursday.

A BBC spokesman told Web User that the outage was "no big drama" and that the iPlayer was down for "just a couple of minutes while a small upgrade was rolled out".