Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2011/11/15/mail_online_down/
Mail Online is broken
How will we ever know why Nigella's looking thin?
Posted in Legal, 15th November 2011 11:32 GMT
Updated The website of the Mail Online – the most read online newspaper in the world - appears to have broken this morning with users finding it impossible to get past the homepage.
All page links have been reset to direct to the home page: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html
Clicking on a story from the homepage only results in the homepage refreshing. Attempting to access stories through Google or by URL only takes readers back to the home page as well. Even Google caches of the pages are not accessible. On other pages it returned a "Service Unavailable" message.
The Daily Mail admitted it was experiencing problems with its site when we phoned. Asked if it was the result of a hack or due to a technical error, the spokeswoman said that they don't know yet. She added that they didn't know how long it had been down for, or when they would get it back up.
According to our calculations, it must have been sometime around 10.30am, and as of publication – about 45 minutes later – the site was still down.
Several high-profile hacks have been aimed at newspapers in the past months – see LulzSec's takedown of The Sun – but internal technical slip-ups can take sites down as well, as The Guardian discovered last month when a staff member accidentally reset their homepage link to go to the site of a New York law firm. ®
Update
The Mail Online was back up as of 11.32 GMT. You can all go on with your lives ...