Customers of UK ISP Sky Broadband Suffer Intermittent Internet

Customers of Sky Broadband (Comcast) are this morning reporting sporadic problems with intermittent connectivity, which doesn’t appear to affect everybody but may be preventing some customers from loading certain websites or connecting to certain online servers.

The problem appears to have started at around 6am and has been growing ever since (likely rising as people wake up to find their broadband connection isn’t working properly). In all cases the physical broadband line seems to be active and working, although the internet connectivity itself is patchy.

Initially we thought this might be a problem with Sky’s Domain Name Servers (DNS) but using a third-party service doesn’t appear to resolve it, although using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) does (i.e. possibly pointing to an issue with their wider routing/peering or related external network suppliers).

Sky has just this moment posted the following brief update, after initially denying that a problem existed. “We are aware of an issue affecting some of our customers broadband across parts of the UK, we’re sorry for this. We have the right people working hard to fix this next – Date reported: 18th November, 09:24,” said a Spokesperson.

Some of Sky Mobile’s data (mobile broadband) using customers have also spotted similar issues, although there aren’t yet enough reports from them to confirm that it’s related.

UPDATE 11:45am

We’re seeing some broadband connections return to normal now, although there hasn’t been much of a change in Sky’s own statement over the past few hours. On top of that we’ve also noted that some of BT’s customers seem to have been affected by a similar issue, albeit to a much smaller degree.

UPDATE 12:35pm

A spokesperson for Sky has confirmed, “Our broadband service is back up and running, and we’re sorry for the disruption caused to some of our customers this morning.” As usual the ISP has not explained what caused the outage.