UPDATE2 Website and Internet Connectivity Woes Hit PlusNet UK Users

It’s two weeks since PlusNet’s last suffered a strange outage (here) and this morning the same appears to have happened again, except this time around their broadband customers and a few linked ISPs (e.g. Origin Broadband, John Lewis) are also experiencing connectivity and web (DNS) problems.

At present it’s somewhat less “broadband that loves you back” and more “broadband that doesn’t work properly“, with two seemingly significant service flops in the space of two weeks causing yet more bad news for the low cost provider.

The latest problem seems to have started at around 8am this morning according to Down Detector, which resulted in some customers being unable to access certain websites and others being unable to get connected.

Apparently those who are unable to get connected have been advised to reboot (power cycle) their broadband routers, which seems to fix it, although the DNS (Domain Name System) linked website problems are still on-going. Mind you if you can’t get online then you probably don’t know about the advice to reboot. Catch-22.

Similarly a related status update from Origin Broadband, which also makes use of some PlusNet connectivity, said: “We’re aware of a DNS issue currently affecting some customers. We’re working on a resolution now, and updates will follow shortly.” Likewise it’s a similar story for John Lewis’s broadband service, which is again linked to PlusNet.

John Lewis – Website and connectivity issues
Created: 10/09/2015 @ 09:27

Our website and internal systems are currently experiencing issues.

In addition, some customers may have trouble connecting to the internet.

If you find you are affected by this please reboot your router in the first instance.

Our engineers are investigating alongside our suppliers, and once we have more information, we’ll provide a further update.

Apologies for the inconvenience caused.

Kind regards,

Matty Cassell

At this stage it’s not clear precisely what’s causing the problem, which appears to be more than a basic DNS bug (swapping the DNS servers to OpenDNS or Google Public DNS works but isn’t perfect).

PlusNet is attempting to keep customers updated via THIS POST on their community forum, although there’s not currently a lot to report. The issue appears sporadic and is not yet affecting all of the customer base.

UPDATE 11:05am

The following response has been given to us by PlusNet.

A PlusNet Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Since early this morning we’ve experienced an outage which affected our phone and broadband service as well as our website. We’ve worked throughout the night to resolve this and have made a lot of progress with most of our customers now up and running. However we still have a few issues which we’re working to solve as soon as possible. We would like to sincerely apologise to our customers for the inconvenience caused.”

Interestingly we didn’t see many such complaints during the night, although that’s perhaps because most consumers only tend to notice these things when they connect in the morning.

UPDATE 3:20pm

A spokesperson for PlusNet gave us the following update: “All our services are now fully restored, including the Plusnet website. Thank you for your patience, we’re really sorry this has happened and would like to apologise for the disruption you’ve experienced.” But still no word on what caused the outage.