BT Infinity FTTC Broadband Users Suffer Week of Slow Website Problems

Customers of the BTInfinity (FTTC) “Fibre Broadband” service, including some ADSL2+ subscribers, appear to have spent the past week or two suffering from a variety of problems with websites and emails being slow or failing to load, with some reports dating back to the very start of this month. The issue has also impacted connectivity to other services, such as Xbox Live and YouTube etc.

Initially it was thought to be a problem related to BT’s Domain Name System (DNS), although the issue appears to continue even after these are circumvented by using an alternative DNS (note: using a VPN does seem to get around the problem).

Unfortunately so far we have been unable to locate any official service status updates from BT, which is despite the issue being reported in several mega-threads on BT’s own community forum (examples here and here), although yesterday there was a very small recognition of the growing complaints.

Robbie Mac, BT’s Community Moderator, said:

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the problems you’re all having. I’m just popping on to this thread to let you know we’re looking into this at the moment and we’ll post back again when we have further info.

All the best,

Robbie

The apparent fault does not appear to be impacting ordinary connection speeds and we’ve noted that some of the complaints also come from BT’s pure copper ADSL2+ based standard broadband subscribers, so it may not be limited to FTTC users, but at present the latter appears to make up the bulk of complaints.

Speculation is currently rife, with some suggesting that it might be due to a fault with one of BT’s website filtering (censorship) systems, although so far we’ve been unable to confirm that. ISPreview.co.uk has contacted BT about the matter and we will update when they respond.

UPDATE:

A BT Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“We are aware of an issue, which is causing some customers to experience intermittent issues when attempting to load web pages.

We are sorry for any inconvenience caused and we are working to fix the problem“.