Broadband internet access services across the country have this morning been disrupted by a major outage at BT Openreach's telephone exchange in Stepney Green (London).

Connections to BT's ADSL / ADSL2+ based broadband lines began dropping at around 8:40am this morning following an unspecified issue with the Stepney Green host link, which is where multiple ISPs interconnect in to BT.



Some services do appear to have been restored and affected customers are being advised to reboot their router (e.g. power it down for a few minutes and then on again) in order to reconnect.

UPDATE 12:15pm

BT has confirmed that the problem, which officially "occurred just after 08:30 this morning", has now been resolved and that only "a small number of customers were affected". It is of course difficult to gauge what "small" means when you're handling millions of lines.

The "technical issue" itself was resolved after around 15 minutes, although some customers reported that the knock-on impact of the outage subsequently caused problems for around an hour or more. For example, broadband provider AAISP stated that "by 09:05 we had about 50% of ADSL lines back online".

BT has promised an official statement for later.

UPDATE 12:39pm

Here's that statement.