UPDATE3 BT Based Broadband ISPs Struck by National UK Outage

Several BT based ISPs, including Zen Internet, Eclipse Internet, PlusNet and others, are reporting that “a significant number of our broadband customers lost connection to the internet” this morning.

The outage, which hit shortly after 11am this morning, appears to have affected providers across the UK and there are conflicting reports about current service status. Zen Internet states that their customers “suffered a brief disconnection but will have reconnected straight away“. Most routers automatically reconnect after a dropped connection but experiences do vary. Meanwhile other ISPs note the problem as being unresolved / under investigation.

UPDATE 12:33pm

The “huge issue” appears to be affecting thousands of circuits and some ISPs are reporting that the problem is coming out of BT’s Faraday (Hadleigh) telephone exchange. The problem is affecting both 20CN (up to 8Mbps ADSL) and 21CN lines.

UPDATE 12:46pm

It seems as though this is indeed an unresolved issue as several ISPs report customers reconnecting and then being dropped again.

UPDATE 1:35pm

Most broadband lines appear to be back online, albeit via “alternative routes“, although PlusNet claims that the “root cause of the problem remains unresolved“. Some disconnections are likely to occur as ISPs work to rebalance their networks and correct for BT’s changes.

AAISP suggests that 4% of its customers were affected which, when applied nationally, could be quite significant. This has had a huge impact across multiple BT based broadband ISPs but not unbundled / LLU services.

UPDATE 2:21pm

BT claims that the underlying issue has now been fixed but as usual it can take awhile for broadband networks to balance out (see above).