UPD2 BT Broadband Services Struck by Major Outage in Southern England

BTOpenreach engineers have been dispatched after BT declared that a Major Service Outage (MSO) had this morning struck its 21CN based broadband ISP services across the south of England, London and Birmingham areas, which has caused customers of multiple providers to lose connectivity.

Precise details vary; it’s believed that the problems began at around 7am after unspecified “configuration changes” to the operators network trigged a fault at several RASs / telephone exchanges across the region. According to AAISP, BT is performing a “technical bridge” to solve the problem and its support teams are said to be “fully engaged“.

Elsewhere PlusNet reported that the problem was affecting the following dialling code areas: 01905, 0121, 01452, 01564, 01684, 01242, 01865, 01789, 0129, 01827, 01527, 01432, 01543, 01926, 01600, 01386, 01676, 01386, 01384, 01885, 01453, 0162275 and 0127373.

BTs Official Status Update

Estimated time to resolve: 15:00

We’re really sorry but we’ve got a problem at the moment nationwide, which means that some of our customers will be having trouble getting online.

Customers may experience intermittent loss of connection or drop in connection.

We’re trying to fix the problem as quickly as we can.

It’s understood that the fault itself was identified at around midday and will now take approximately 2 hours for it to be “manually restored” (i.e. the fix is expected by around 14:00 or 15:00). At present this issue is affecting 21CN lines and all related ISPs appear to be reporting it, although it could also be impacting some ADSL services on BT’s older 20CN network but we’ve had no firm confirmation of that.. yet.

UPDATE 12:33pm

Some ISPs report that connections are slowly resuming, although many remain offline.

UPDATE 4:47pm

Various ISPs say that the problem should now be resolved and affected customers are advised to power down their broadband kit and power on again in order to re-establish a connection (assuming it doesn’t return of its own accord).

Customers still affected should power down their ADSL equipment fully before retesting. Customers still experiencing problems after this should contact technical support