Some Users of UK Broadband ISP TalkTalk Struggling to Access Websites UPDATE

Some customers of UK internet provider TalkTalk appear to be struggling to access certain websites, including major ones like github.io, due to what appears to be some sort of peering or routing issue. The ISP’s network teams are said to be “currently investigating” the ongoing issue.

According to customers affected by the issue, the problem appears to have started at around 1am last night and is currently ongoing. The issue has also been reported on other platforms, such as Wix (here), and a few moments ago TalkTalk posted the following Service Status update: “We’re aware some customers are experiencing issues browsing certain websites, we are currently investigating the issue.”

Customers who experience this problem may find that some of the websites they try to access will simply time out (fail to load) in their web browsers. At the time of writing, it remains unclear whether this is related to a direct routing / peering problem or some sort of issue with TalkTalk’s network-level filtering (e.g. parental controls). Various related threads can also be found on the provider’s community forum (here, here and here).

Some of the reports suggest that this may be related to Cloudflare hosted sites, but it appears to be impacting those hosted by other CDN platforms too.

UPDATE 4:14pm

We’ve had an update from TalkTalk.

A TalkTalk spokesperson said:

“Our investigation identified a traffic routing issue that affected a small number of customers and websites, and has now been resolved. We apologise for any inconvenience and will conduct a full investigation to determine the root cause.”