UPDATE4 BT’s Broadband ISP Network in East Anglia Suffers Major Outage

Several Internet Service Providers are this morning reporting a number of seemingly related Major Service Outages (MSO) on BT Wholesale’s broadband network, which appears to be causing issues of intermittent Internet connectivity across England’s East Anglia region and some of the surrounding areas (e.g. Norfolk, Suffolk, North Essex).

The problems are believed to have started at around 8am this morning, although many ISPs are only now beginning to report the issues on their service status pages. At present both 21CN DSL (ADSL2+ and including FTTC/VDSL etc.) and Ethernet services appear to be affected and some of the related problems areas are listed below.

Areas Suffering the Major Service Outage
BURY ST EDMUNDS
CROMER
DEDHAM
EARLS COLNE
GREAT HORKESLEY
GREAT WENHAM
HARWICH
HOLBROOK
KESSINGLAND
NORWICH
RAMSEY
RATTLESDEN
SAWSTON
ST OSYTH

We have requested further details from BT. Meanwhile some ISPs are anticipating a fix by around midday, but this has yet to be confirmed.

UPDATE 12:19pm

Oddly we’ve had no reply from BT’s press office today; they’re usually much faster than this. Meanwhile some ISPs are starting to report a slow but steady return to normal service, although it appears as if some areas are continuing to suffer problems.

UPDATE 3pm

BT still hasn’t responded to our hails concerning the cause of this outage but ISPs are now advising that all services appear to have been restored, although some customers may need to switch their router on and off (power cycle / reboot) in order to get back online. Yes it’s a very cliché I.T. recommendation but that’s because it often works.

UPDATE 17th June 2014

One of BT’s spokesfolk, after a bit of prodding, has given us the following statement: “We can confirm that a technical issue resulted in a loss of broadband service for a small number of customers in the East of England yesterday morning. Our engineers were dispatched immediately and service was restored before 11.30am, but we apologise for any inconvenience this might have caused.”

Judging by what ISPs were telling us it wasn’t a “small number of customers“, although the concept of scale for an operator that must consider tens of millions of broadband lines is always open to interpretation.

UPDATE 18th June 2014

Apparently the outage appears to have been caused by the combination of a cable break and a configuration issue. Aquiss reported this morning that the problems were finally fully resolved at 20:38 last night, following a fibre fault at Guildford, card change at Reading and card reseat at Kendel Green.