UPDATE3 Zen Internet Struggle with Website and Payment Service Outage

Broadband and communications provider Zen Internet has become the latest ISP to suffer a serious problem with their website and some related online services, which appears to have started on Saturday afternoon (before 2pm) and is still on-going this morning now fixed.

Only recently PlusNet experienced a spate of significant website related outages (here) and now Zen Internet has joined the club. At the time of writing it appears as if many of Zen’s public facing websites and related services are still offline, such as their Online Invoice Payment (secure.zen.co.uk), Customer Portal (portal.zen.co.uk / zen.co.uk) and Partner Portal (zenpartner.com).

After looking further we also note that their support portal (support.zen.co.uk) is similarly down, although we’ve still been able to access their service status feed and after a bit of digging were able to pin down the relevant Fault Report.

Zen’s Website Outage (Status Update)

We are currently experiencing an issue with the Zen public facing websites.

This is affecting the following:

Online Invoice Payment (secure.zen.co.uk)
Customer Portal (https://portal.zen.co.uk)
Partner Portal (https://www.zenpartner.com)

Our engineers are investigating and further updates will be posted here when available.

Zen regret any inconvenience this may cause.

Sadly the last update was also posted on Saturday and so it’s unclear what progress, if any, has been made on the issue since then. Zen has around 100,000 subscribers across the United Kingdom.

UPDATE 9:06am

The service status report has been updated to state that “Customers on Non-Zen IP ranges are currently unable to access zen websites. Customer will still be able to access https://portal.zen.co.uk from there zen connections,” which suggests that customers who do have a Zen IP address can now see the ISPs websites.

UPDATE 11:44am

It looks like the problem has finally been fixed, although there’s still no word on the cause.

UPDATE 1:45pm

A spokesperson for Zen has informed ISPreview.co.uk that the problems were caused by a malicious DDoS attack. “Over the weekend, we suffered a targeted DDoS attack which made our websites and portals inaccessible for periods of time. Our team worked throughout Saturday and Sunday to put measures in place to mitigate the effects of the attack. This morning, full service was restored. We have a team of experts working together to further strengthen the security around our websites and portals. We apologise to anyone affected,” said Zen.