London Broadband ISP Community Fibre Back Online After Outage
Customers of broadband ISP CommunityFibre appear to be coming back online after the operator suffered a sizeable network outage in London today, which has been disrupting internet connectivity for thousands of users over the past few hours (since just after 11:30am this morning).
The cause of the problem is not yet known, although it seemed to be linked to the provider’s Domain Name System (DNS) as a number of customers were able to resolve the outage by switching to third-party DNS servers, such as those run by Google’s Public DNS (IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).
At the time of writing, CommunityFibre has yet to update their service status page with confirmation of a fix, although Down Detector shows that a few users are still reporting issues. The message currently still reads: “Some customers may be experiencing disruption to their service. Our engineers are aware of this issue and working on a solution as their top priority. We apologise for any inconvenience caused and appreciate your patience.”
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The operator’s 3Gbps speed FTTP network currently covers 1.32 million UK premises, mostly in London, and is home to 310,000 customers (24th Oct 2024).
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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Looks like they also turned off their calls and live chat so customers don’t spam them!!
Kinda off topic but it’s frustrating to see Google’s DNS resolvers mentioned as this may result in more people using them.
Have a look at their logging policy to see just how much information they retain (it’s a lot) – https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy
Something like Quad9 is on par and actually privacy focussed. Better to mention their IPs instead.
Agreed, but in this case the Google DNS is one that two customers confirmed they had used to bypass the issue in question, so it had greater relevance.
Cloudflare is another option (1.1.1.1)
Quad9 was set up by the City of London Police. So it depends if you trust them or Google most…
More trustworthy than your post. Quad9 was setup by a Swiss not-for-profit company in Zurich.
On their 3Gps package and the damn technicolour router they provide doesn’t let you change DNS settings on the LAN side, so each client has to be done individually.
Wish they’d stop giving us gimped versions of firmware. On the Velop mesh it was easy to change.
I’ve been very happy with CF but just like every other ISP I’ve been with or work for the comms on outages has been really poor. How hard is it to have an hourly update feed?