Openreach UK Recovers After Ethernet Ordering System Failure

Openreach (BT) has now recovered after last week suffering from a serious “intermittent system failure” that impacted several of their systems, which just so happened to be “critical” for processing Ethernet / Dark Fibre provision orders and Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) requests by AltNet broadband ISPs.

According to a private ISP briefing of the situation, the failure started around the 14th or 15th of September and was promptly “escalated to the most senior levels in Openreach.” The system failure essentially ended up “negating [their] ability to process orders” from ISPs for the aforementioned services (a total of 40 applications were impacted).

As one communications provider told us, “[Openreach’s] service desks can’t actually access systems to investigate faults, planning teams can’t plan or progress, engineering work was completed yesterday where it was already allocated, but they can’t close the jobs, unable to allocate further work or close tasks.”

The good news is that the operator appears to have now resolved all of this, and they’ve since invoked catch-up mechanisms to restore their service output and levels. Openreach didn’t say exactly when the fault was finally resolved, but we believe that they fixed it on Friday (17th).

A Spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview.co.uk:

“The issue was due to a fault with our traffic management system at one of our Reigate Data Centres. This impacted around 40 applications for Openreach. The issue has now been resolved. “

Two related briefings have also been issued on this case, although both are marked as confidential (here and here) and not available to the public. Major system faults like this are rare, but it’s unlikely to have lasted long enough to seriously impact the operator’s minimum quality of service targets.