Customers of Giganet Broadband Suffer Mass UK Service Outage UPDATE

Fern Trading-backed UK ISP Giganet (Cuckoo) appears to have been suffering from a “mass service outage” over the past 12-24 hours which, judging by feedback from customers across the UK, has resulted in a variety of sporadic connectivity problems since around 3pm yesterday afternoon.

Firstly, credit where credit is due, because Giganet – unlike the biggest ISPs in this market – has done a reasonable job of keeping their service status page updated throughout the situation. Initially the provider reported that only users with Legacy (ADSL2+), SuperBOLT (FTTC), UltraBOLT (G.Fast) and UltraBEAM (FTTP) services were affected (i.e. Openreach), but we’ve also had reports of problems from those on their CityFibre platform too (this also impacted other ISPs on the same network).

Customers have generally been reporting several periods – lasting anything from a few minutes to a few hours – of total internet connectivity loss during yesterday afternoon and evening. According to Giganet, this appears to have been caused by a “power failure” at one of their partner’s carrier networks (none are named). The good news is that “all remaining services were restored at 4:30am” this morning, but we note that they’ve also been having some issues with one of their authentication (radius) servers for several days.

However, it should be said that some of Giganet’s customers have just reported another service interruption that appears to have occurred at around 9am this morning, although at the time of writing it’s unclear whether this is a national or more localised problem (the issue has not yet been noted on their service status page).

“Our partner carrier confirmed that all remaining services were restored at 4:30am. We thank you for your patience and we sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused during this time. We are continuing to monitor for any further issues,” said the latest service update. Take note that major outages at Giganet are generally very rare.

UPDATE 15th May 2023

We’ve had an update from Giganet.

A Spokesperson for Giganet said:

“Around 35% of our customer base were affected by a short outage caused on Wednesday 9 May, and Thursday 10 May, with a small number of customers affected for a longer duration. Customers accessing Giganet’s own network were completely unaffected during this period.

While our Status Page cited reported outages with our ADSL and FTTC customer base, this was in error and the issues were isolated to those on the affected network. We will now be updating our Status Page to ensure it is accurate going forward. We are actively working with our carrier on their post incident review process and can confirm all services have now been restored. We would like to thank our customers for their patience during this process.”