UPDATE3 Tesco Broadband Hit by Major UK Outage Ahead of TalkTalk Swap

A significant country-wide service outage appears to be impacting thousands of customers on Tesco’s broadband service, which is currently in the process of being acquired by TalkTalk following a deal that was signed in January.

A Tweet posted by Tesco at midday simply stated, “We’re aware that customers around the country are experiencing issues with [broadband] service currently. We’re investigating and will update ASAP.” Tesco later confirmed that the issue was impacting “multiple areas” and apologised for the inconvenience, before adding that they intended to “resolve the problem ASAP“.

The outage has raised suspicions as to whether or not it’s related to TalkTalk’s recent acquisition of the Tesco’s 75,000 broadband and 20,000 phone customers (here). At present Tesco is still using Vodafone’s LLU network, although it stopped selling related services during February 2015 and prior to that TalkTalk had said that they intended to migrate customers on to their platform “over the coming months“; but this won’t be completed until September 2015.

UPDATE 5:43pm

A spokesperson for TalkTalk notes that the migration process has not yet begun and thus we can rule that out as a possible cause.

UPDATE 22nd April 2015

An update posted by Tesco last night, after we left the office for the day, simply stated: “We are seeing customers coming back online, waiting for more confirmation…. #FingersCrossed“. No further updates have been made in the last 13 hours or so.

UPDATE 22nd April 2015

Apparently the problem was caused by a “technical failure at a network level” (obviously), which doesn’t tell us much, and an updated post mid-morning today states: “We believe the outage to now be resolved. If you are still experiencing issues with your broadband, please restart your router.”