UPD6 Thousands Hit by BT Broadband ISP Outage in Scotland and England

Thousands of internet users have been knocked offline this morning after BT’s 20CN and 21CN broadband network in Scotland, Northern Ireland and some of North West England was hit by an unspecified fault at one of the operators “metro nodes” in Scotland. Multiple UK ISPs are being affected.

According to Eclipse Internet, some 2,500 of their customers suddenly lost connectivity at around 9:01am this morning and similar reports are springing up from other providers too. BT are investigating the problem and have already set an “estimate fix” time of 1pm.

BTs Official Status Update

“We’re really sorry but we’ve got a problem at the moment in Edinburgh and the surrounding areas, which means that some of our customers will be having trouble getting online. We’re trying to fix the problem as quickly as we can.“

More as we get it..

UPDATE 10:30am

AAISP state that BT has lost service to 2 x 10Gbps circuits.

Separately business provider HighNet Telecoms reports that some 5,000 DSL connections are down between multiple ISPs and BTWholesale.

UPDATE 11:10am

Three ISPs report that some lines are now being restored.

UPDATE 11:27am

AAISP has managed to get the following update from BT, which sheds some light on the situation: “The affected router has had stopped process restarted and the controlled  recovery of the device is being closely monitored. Service should be  available within the next 30 minutes. The geographical area of impact is  across Scotland, the North of England and Northern Ireland, on traffic  that was terminating on this router.”

UPDATE 11:38am

Zen Internet reports that the nodes affected are: Edinburgh, Preston, Glasgow South and Newcastle Upon Tyne.

UPDATE 12:19pm

Normal service should now have been restored, although some people may need to reboot their broadband routers first.

UPDATE 12:39pm

Here is BT’s official statement.

A BT Spokesman told ISPreview.co.uk:

“A router failure at Edinburgh’s Donaldson exchange affected some broadband and Ethernet services this morning, mainly in parts of Scotland, the North of England and Northern Ireland. Services failed just after 9am and were fully restored just after 11am. We’d advise any consumer broadband users experiencing any residual issue to reboot their equipment before contacting their service provider.”