Broadband and Phone Outage in Wales Impacts 140,000 People

Customers on BT and Sky Broadband’s network experienced a 2 hour loss of both Internet and phone connectivity mid-yesterday morning after an unspecified fault triggered a “multiple exchange outage” that impacted services across parts of South Wales.

Sky’s official update, which is still visible on their Facebook page even though it was only posted after the problem had been resolved (here), does little to elaborate and merely apologises to customers for “any inconvenience caused“.

However Wales Online reports that the problem affected 140,000 customers in the region and appeared to be centred on BT’s Whitchurch telephone exchange in Cardiff. According to Sky, the outage occurred as a result of an “unforeseen issue from on-site testing” (i.e. epic engineer fail) and lasted from around 10:45am to 12:30pm.