Broadband ISP Plusnet Recovers from DNS Linked Mass Outage
Low-cost focused UK broadband ISP Plusnet (BT Group) has apologised to customers after their internet service was hit by a “mass outage” that struck yesterday afternoon and lasted for several hours. The issue appears to have been related to a problem with their Domain Name System (DNS).
The DNS service typically works by converting Internet Protocol (IP) addresses into a human-readable form and back again (e.g. 123.56.32.122 becomes – examplezfakedomainlols.co.uk). Services like this tend to be provided automatically by your broadband and mobile provider, usually operating seamlessly in the background.
However, it’s not uncommon for ISPs to very occasionally suffer from problems with their DNS servers, which may relate to a fault or misconfiguration in the system. Such an issue is what appears to have impacted Plusnet yesterday afternoon, starting with a surge of complaints – mostly across social media – at around 4pm and then subsiding roughly two hours later.
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Sadly, Plusnet doesn’t appear to have a Service Status page any more to centralise related updates for customers (we couldn’t find one), but across social media they did put out a brief statement to those who asked. A spokesperson said: “I’m sorry to hear your internet has gone down, we’ve been made aware of a mass outage that’s currently being investigated as a priority. We don’t have an estimated fix time but are working hard to get this resolved quickly for you.”
Customers of the service quickly figured out that their physical connection to Plusnet was still live and that the disruption to internet connectivity with online services could be resolved by adopting a third-party DNS provider (e.g. Google Public DNS, Quad9, Cloudflare DNS etc.), which is despite the provider asking them not to make this change – possibly because it may prevent some of their other / filtering services from working correctly, and they already had a fix in the works.
In any case, the mass outage was soon resolved and Plusnet have since said that they’re “very sorry for any inconvenience caused“, albeit without providing any details on the cause.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Where possible I always try to use a third party DNS service – Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) as my primary and Google (8.8.8.8) as my secondary although it can cause problems when connecting to public wifi hotspots.
I had that yesterday but this is not the first time it’s happened.
Had at least 2 or 3 times before recently with PlusNet.
Goes down for about an hour each time.
“Plusnet has apologised to customers …”
No they havent
Why do all companies communicate via social media these days?
I’m not on any social media. Why can’t they just email or text me?
You get what you pay for.
I guess we don’t all have fantastic careers like you and can afford more expensive ISP’s.