Customers of UK ISP Zen Hit by Core Network Problems UPDATE
Some customers of Zen Internet’s broadband and Ethernet services, particularly those whose connections terminate in London, are this morning suffering from some unusual internet connectivity problems, which means that your line may be live but a few popular online services (e.g. web browsing) will not be fully functional.
The problem began at about 9am this morning and in a brief statement on Twitter the ISP said, “We are aware of a large outage affecting multiple suppliers and providers this morning. Users will be connected but unable to browse the web. Our team is investigating with our supplier and working to restore service. We will update as we know more.”
At the time of writing we haven’t been able to spot which other ISPs are affected by this issue. The related incident page on Zen’s website classes the problem as a “routing and core network” issue, where the “main symptom for customers is a loss of web browsing.” Apparently, they have “identified that TCP appears not to be working for these customers but other protocols (UDP, ICMP, DNS) are working.”
We have to credit Zen on their ability to give more information in a single sentence than TalkTalk, BT, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband and other large providers could manage through an entire outage.
UPDATE 11:33am
Nothing terribly new but we’ve just had this statement. A spokesperson for Zen told ISPreview.co.uk: “We are aware of a large outage from around 09:20 this morning, which is not an issue with the Zen network but a more widespread issue affecting multiple suppliers and internet service providers across the UK. Users will be connected but unable to browse the internet. Our Engineers are investigating and are working to restore the service back to normal.”
We are seeing some connections returning to normal, which suggests that they may have found a temporary or full fix.
UPDATE 1:16pm
Zen appears to have resolved this. In a statement the ISP said, “Our engineers have identified the location of the issue and re-routed traffic over a resilient path to restore customers service. Zen regrets any inconvenience this incident may have caused.”
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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popular services like “web browsing”.
LOL
“We have to credit Zen on their ability to give more information in a single sentence than TalkTalk, BT, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband and other large providers could manage through an entire outage.”
That’s the truth and then-some, it’s like pulling teeth even trying to cure out an outage with VM..
Virgin during an outage are like Iraq’s information minister during the Iraq war. “There are no American tanks in Baghdad.” When the tanks were visible behind him rolling past.
One thing you can be sure about with Zen is their ability to quickly identify,communicate it to their customers and then resolve a problem because they have the right people in the right place to fix it.
The same can’t be said for the vast majority of ISP’s or carriers.
Aqc, I pulled teeth for 35 years and I can assure you the vast majority of them are considerably easier than phoning most customer services, hehehehehe! I’ve also been with Zen for a very long time, and it’s been a long time because they are extremely good :o)
Zen continues its reputation as offering high levels of customer service
I’ve had problems all day and things still aren’t quite back to normal, thankfully my cheap backup line (Vodafone Fttc) has kept us going (a little router tweaking required). Hats off to Zen for being open and transparent on the issue. Hats off to me (from my wife) for keeping the backup connection!
We all still call BS on this – only Zen and anyone using Zen wholesale seems to have had issues, I’ve yet to find any ISP that isn’t using Zen Wholesale or is Zen itself that had issues
I don’t think Zen has been at all transparent – what is this “other providers” thing – who are they? Nobody knows…
The service status actually reads like Zen have had an issue with some of their Exchange backhaul interconnects in London.
Possibly an issue with a 3rd party router but certainly not widespread outside of Zen.
Some of my web browsing was affecting and i use idnet
I like their honesty. Other good isps used to be like that too but sadly fewer and fewer these days.