William and Kate bring BBC website to its knees

The popularity of the royal wedding proved too much for the BBC website which crashed on Friday under sheer weight of traffic.

Users reported on Twitter that they were unable to watch live streaming of the ceremony from Westminster Abbey. It also affected some of the corporation's other online offerings, such as live coverage of the world snooker championship.

The BBC issued an initial statement confirming it was "experiencing some technical issues with BBC online. We're investigating and will update when we have more information."

It later added: "We are experiencing some technical issues with BBC Online due to the sheer weight of traffic which may cause the site to be slower than normal in some cases."

The problems will be an embarrassment for the corporation with an increase in traffic hardly unexpected for what has been billed as the media event of the decade.

"First royal wedding 'real' effects: bbc website almost unavailable," tweeted PinoSixtyFive. Bushmclovin tweeted: "What a time for your website to crash BBC."

Video coverage of the ceremony was interrupted by a holding page telling users: "We are experiencing abnormal traffic to our network or the service or servers it is on is not currently available.

"Please ... try again later once we have solved the problem."