Major Outage Hits UK ISP Sky Broadband in South England and Wales UPDATE3
Customers of Sky Broadband (Comcast), particularly those in the South East of England and Wales, were hit by a significant broadband and phone (VoIP) outage last night that appeared to last for several hours. The bad news is that Sky appears to be suffering from yet more service disruption this morning and in the same area.
The initial outage began at around 6pm yesterday and, in a brief statement, Sky said: “Broadband and Talk problems in South East England and Wales – You might not be able to get online or make/receive phone calls due to a problem in your local area. Our technical teams will continue to work overnight to fix the problem and we will provide an update on progress in the morning. We’re sorry for the continued inconvenience.”
The situation appeared to have subsided by around 2am this morning, but that may be partly because most people had gone to bed, and it promptly started to take off again at 6am. Customer reports show that some connections did return at around 1-2am, but promptly went down again. The latest update from Sky, which was posted at around 7:59am this morning, said: “We’ve identified the problem and our engineers are working hard to restore service as soon as possible. We’re sorry for any continued inconvenience caused.”
As per usual, Sky has not said what the cause of the problem is or why it’s taking them so long to resolve it (protracted outages like this usually occur due to a complex core fibre optic cable break). The impact of this disruption is somewhat sporadic, which means that not everybody in the affected region will be suffering from problems.
UPDATE 9:32am
Sky has sent us a very brief statement.
A Sky Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:
“We are aware of issues impacting Sky Broadband and Talk customers in Cardiff and parts of the South East of England. We are investigating the issue and we’re sorry for any inconvenience this may be causing.”
UPDATE 3rd Sept 2021 – 6:55am
Sky furnished us with an update just before 7pm last night (after we’d stopped working), which confirmed that the problems had been resolved. However, we are currently seeing a modest up-tick in complaints again this morning (once again starting at around 6am), so we’ll keep an eye on that to see if it’s related or a separate incident. Some of the same areas are involved.
A Sky spokesperson said:
“The majority of Sky customers impacted by the intermittent issues with Broadband and Talk should now have their service restored. We’re sorry for the inconvenience this has caused.”
As usual, no explanation is given for the cause of what was quite a significant level of disruption.
UPDATE 3rd Sept 2021 – 9:13am
Most of the connectivity problems being seen this morning relate to a different area in Aberdeen and Inverness in Scotland, which Sky Broadband has confirmed.
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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Well that explains the 5-10% packet loss through Sky’s network last night then.
not just cardiff , WEST WALES TOO my kids are on sky and are both going nuts as both are working from home
I work from home and at 12.15 Pm Thursday while my sky phone is now working my Q Box Internet connection is still not working.
No internet here in Tunbridge wells been down all morning
1234hrs. Nothing here in Winchester all morning.
Rochester off last night. On for a little while this morning, but back off again
Lost broadband in st Ives, Cambridgeshire
Gone down near Hexham in Northumberland now as well
Hahahaha typical Sky, they do everything on the cheap with eye opening cost cutting measures. They’ll take there time to fix it and do it cheaply. They don’t really care and the compensation they are legally obliged to give out or penny’s, because you pay so little for the broadband and phone services.
Wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole. At least if you call them up to complain they can try to upsell you something as all call centre staff are required to do so.
My old man’s was down in Porthcawl. Told him to turn the router OFF for 15 mins to do a line reset. It worked
I think I need to translate ISP communications when they have an outage just so the layman can understand what is happening.
Please note these translations are generic and do not refer to any particular ISP. Just in case any of them get upset.
‘We are aware of issues impacting our network and customers somewhere in the UK’
Means : We are now putting out a public statement as we have f’ing problems with our network, everyone is trying to call us and our problems are being broadcast across the web. But we are not networking experts and have no idea what is going wrong and where. We built the network on the cheap in order to offer you cheap broadband and still be able to pay our execs huge salaries.’
‘We are investigating the issue’
We have just phoned a couple of contract network engineers (most were not available at short notice as they were busy, but we managed to find a few that were available (probably because they are not very good)) to see if they can tell us what is wrong with our network. We had to call two engineers in, as the first one took one look at our network and died laughing.
‘we’re sorry for any inconvenience caused’
We have just read the customer service manual and it says we should say this when an outage occurs. We are not actually sorry at all, but we are hoping no one cancels their broadband service with us, please don’t as it costs us so much money to acquire new customers.
Once we figure out what the problem is, we wont tell you, as it would be too embarrassing and would indicate how many single points of failure we have in our network.
Why is only Sky Broadband quoted? If Sky Broadband is affected, then Now Broadband (sister company to Sky) is also affected, given the underlying network topology/infrastructure is one and the same.
Sky/Now Broadband routers are interchangeable, just re-badging.
i.e. If you’re having problems with Sky Broadband, switching to Now Broadband won’t help the situation.