OFNL Suffer Major National UK Full Fibre Broadband Outage UPDATE3
Alternative network operator Open Fibre Networks Limited (OFNL / GTC / BUUK), which typically serves new build homes with gigabit fibre (FTTP) via several of their supporting UK broadband ISPs, appears to be suffering a major national outage this morning that is also making it difficult to access their Incidents Page.
The feedback received from some of OFNL’s customers this morning suggests that everything was working well until around 10am, when the service went down. The good news is that some of OFNL’s internet providers maintain their own service status pages (e.g. Seethelight’s status page), which confirm what their customers are saying. The operator has also been quick to acknowledge the outage.
318282: INCIDENT AFFECTING BROADBAND AND VOICE SERVICES Last updated:(02 Sep 2024 10:20hrs)
Status: Currently open.
Location: Network Wide.We are currently experiencing a network incident affecting our entire network. Engineers are currently investigating the issue and will provide an update as soon as possible.Please do not reset your equipment.We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
No updates for this incident yet.
A number of broadband ISPs on their network are also advising customers not to “reset your equipment” (router), as this won’t resolve the current issue. Sources have told ISPreview that the issue might be related to Sky Backhaul (capacity links), but at the time of writing we don’t have any further information.
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UPDATE 11:37am
The latest status update, as posted at 11:12am, provides a bit more detail: “We are aware that one of our core network suppliers is experiencing a major network incident that is affecting Internet performance over our network. We have implemented a work around in our core network that will help improve performance for some customers. Customers may still continue to experience a reduction in Internet performance and stability.”
UPDATE 12:34pm
The operator has just put out another update, although we’re still seeing customers complain about connectivity problems, and so it hasn’t resolved the issues for everybody yet.
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Update (02 Sep 2024 12:25hrs)
We are seeing performance over our network improve.
Our engineers are continuing to investigate the problem and we will provide further information once investigations are complete.
UPDATE 12:54pm
Some of OFNLs ISPs are reporting that customers are now coming back online in large numbers as OFNL work through their sites to adopt their backup backhaul links. Hopefully everything will soon be fully resolved.
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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“The operator has also been quick to acknowledge the outage.” Until at least 11:30 their incidents website was returning 502 from upstream. Also their latest statement says that they’ve implemented some workaround but it apparently doesn’t cover my line.
“one of our core network suppliers” it looks like there is only one supplier. Do anyone know who this supplier is?
I think they rely quite heavily on sky, no idea if it is them though!
I know what happened as BT was partially affected, at those exact times Microsoft Entra and Azure had partial and total outages, in particular affecting BT Wholesale and Ethernet customers impacting Azure services, Azure virtual networks went down and so did Azure VMs and other Blob storage containers this morning around that time.
I would be inclined to suspect they use Azure for their cloud network platform or at least parts.
I know other providers were affected but not as badly as I was on the phone to BT Ethernet support and other providers this morning comparing tracert’s from Non affected networks and affected networks to a particular Azure Nodes.
No, you don’t. They aren’t routing customers through Azure or AWS, neither are BT Wholesale, that’d be totally moronic.
There are only so many companies with nationwide networks, very few actually, and one of them had an issue today.
Witcher, BT Wholesale services were definitely affected, I know line management features were not accessible today, not via the wholesale portal anyway. All 6 leased lines were showing as hard down all morning whereas Talktalk, virgin Neo etc were all up, while in reality they were all UP and operational reporting tools on their side showed outages, I know of a UK ISP is definitely using Azure, I know they are using it as I was in the meeting being given requirements for the deployment of IPv6 across their on prem and cloud infrastructure which includes Azure.
Loss of some cloud services where VMs are running provisioning, monitoring, reporting, whatever for BT Wholesale isn’t going to stop an entirely unrelated entity from carrying traffic much as it didn’t stop BT Wholesale from carrying traffic.
You said as much yourself – bits of wholesale management and monitoring down, customer services running as normal, no impact to forwarding traffic.
‘BT Wholesale services were definitely affected, I know line management features were not accessible today, not via the wholesale portal anyway. All 6 leased lines were showing as hard down all morning whereas Talktalk, virgin Neo etc were all up, while in reality they were all UP’
So just to clarify again no ISP is routing customer traffic through Azure and an Azure outage didn’t break OFNL. It has about as much to do with this as any other random loss of some workload running in a public cloud.
Believe the root outage was at Neos Networks who in turn provide at least some of the IP network OFNL use to connect their various developments. Might be mistaken.
Strange they’d only have one peering unless the only provider they peer with is sky. You’d like to think they could just retire that route.
They mentioned the problem was with their core network not their peering. They don’t own a national fibre network, they are paying others to provide the bandwidth to connect all their developments together.
We are with Rocket Fibre using OFNL and they are down currently (as of 12:04) Rocket confirming that the issue is with OFNL core network.
OFNL should be subjected to the same exact rules as Openreach and KCOM. It’s awful for people living in a new build estate covered by OFNL to not have access to fast cheap and stable internet. The O in their name stands for Open but their network is actually closed
The problem was with OFNL doing networking as cheap as possible or to be more precise probably Sky being their only supplier of underlying network, no matter who do you sign with from OFNL resellers in case like this. The real issue is that people living in new biuld estate has no other choice because road/pavements belong to house developers and nobody else can build an alternative network. As usually OFCOM/govt is not interested in changing this state. We’ve been told that it will take up to two years to pass land to the local council but we are in year three and nothing happened.
In fairness OFNL is more “open” than KCOM 🙂
@Name
Land adoption on new build sites is never a given, especially if it has not been built to adoptable standards. I’ve yet to see a recent new build site that could be adopted without significant changes.
With regards to OFNL, there are often exclusivity arrangements in place which limit any new providers coming along. This was the case at a 2017 David Wilson development I viewed.
Awful network.
I have a family member who moved into new build 7 years ago with this network being only one available still the same case today.
The prices are high very limited providers who even charge for moving between each provider and they use such old equipment as well (family member I mentioned still is running same router which has been iffy since day one and they wont offer another one on the website it still lists that same one technicolour and only zte h298n both are garbage)
Just a quick note (I’ve been a happy OFNL customer for some time) but I took the decision long ago to not use the providers own hardware and instead use an Eero device which I have never regretted and have had excellent service and uptime and service. To be fair even if I was on openreach or virgin I would avoid stock hardware as much as possible.
I do agree though that the hardware supplied by OFNL providers are pretty dire (well – seethelight anyway) but I guess this would be the same with many providers regardless of being OFNL.
Doesn’t sound like OFNL. OFNL gives ONT with ethernet, no routers. What your family member has is most likely router sold by one of the ISP operating on their network and it can be replaced at any time. Also in terms of service prices I did some resarch and they are more or less the same like elsewhere, but outages at network level are annoying.
Does anyone know what happens if you did reset your router? Ours went at around 9 and of course there was no news of the OFNL issues until much later so the first thing we did was reset before calling our provider as that’s the usual advice.
I restarted my router when it first happened (not realising it was an outage) but it came back by itself. Probably best to treat as a different issue and contact their support if a restart of the router and OFNL unit doesn’t work.
Good luck
Nothing, you’ll still have no internet.
Still not working