Anyone having issues with BBC news site?

Apologies for not being specifically broadband related but for the past couple of weeks I've had an issue with BBC news site which is annoying me. I was wondering if anyone else had seen it.

If I bring my laptop out of sleep/hibernation and immediately try to get to news.bbc.co.uk (it used to be my homepage) there will be a long delay of nearly half a minute. The screen will be blank but at the bottom the status line will say 'waiting for emp.bbci.co.uk'. Having got fed up of the waiting I changed my home page to be The Register and there is no such delay with that site. Even more curiously if I go to the BBC site after five minutes there's also no delay. My normal browser is Google Chrome but I've also observed this using IE9.

I have a rough idea of what emp.bbci.co.uk is but I'm puzzled as to why it seems to be triggered/related to bringing my laptop out of sleep/hibernation. I've noticed once or twice my work desktop also seems to stall for a few seconds when first booted but it's nothing like as bad as my laptop. I've emailed the BBC but there seems to be surprisingly little discussion online about this. The only report I can currently find is this:

http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/25/33681424-bbc-ne...

Any thoughts?

That sounds like the timing of when the main www.bbc.co.uk site went live instead of being available as a beta. Have you tried clearing all bbc-related cookies?

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 23-Dec-11 09:31:12)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

That sounds like the timing of when the main www.bbc.co.uk site went live instead of being available as a beta. Have you tried clearing all bbc-related cookies?

No, might be worth a try. Thanks.

This error is still occurring even in 2013. My researches suggest it is a tracking cookie request that many browsers are properly set to reject. However, the BBC site keeps trying to set it on your computer and it may take 20 minutes for it to realise it is getting nowhere.
To my mind, it is unacceptable.