DDoS Attack Disrupting Users of ISP Youfibre’s UK Broadband Service UPDATE2
Customers connected to UK ISP Youfibre (and possibly other ISPs) on one of the country’s largest alternative full fibre (FTTP) broadband networks, Netomnia (Substantial Group), are currently understood to be experiencing “intermittent connectivity or slower-than-usual performance” due to an ongoing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
DDoS attacks work by attempting to overload target servers or end-user with masses of data requests from multiple internet connected devices (often malware hijacked computers / botnets etc.), which can cause the intended target to crash or suffer performance problems until the bad traffic stops or can be mitigated. On rare occasions, such attacks may also expose other weaknesses to exploit, such as happened with TalkTalk in 2015 (here).
Sadly, it’s not uncommon for UK broadband providers and networks to be hit by DDoS attacks, which happen all the time. But most of those can be mitigated and only very few are usually big enough to actually be noticed by customers. Sometimes such incidents may not even be an attack against the network operator, but rather somebody targeting a specific customer or upstream network provider for the ISP etc.
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Most internet providers usually prefer not to speak about such things in public, often putting related incidents down to ambiguous network connectivity faults instead. But some are more open and honest than others. In this case, Youfibre’s CEO, Jeremy Chelot, has confirmed (X) that a DDoS is ongoing: “Please bear with us. We are under attack.”
Youfibre Service Statement
We are currently experiencing an unexpected issue affecting parts of our network, which may result in intermittent connectivity or slower-than-usual performance. Our network engineers are investigating the source of the disruption and are taking immediate steps to mitigate the impact and restore full service.
UPDATE 11:46am
Customers are reporting a return to normal service and the ISP has provided the following update: “We can confirm that the issues have been fully resolved. We appreciate your understanding and patience during this time.”
UPDATE 3:40pm
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Clearly the attackers have adapted their methods or started a new assault (not uncommon with DDoS). We’ve seen customer reports of more problems, and YouFibre just issued the following update (X): “We are sorry to report that YouFibre has been subjected to a DDoS attack today (28.11.25). We are working very hard to resolve this. From a high level, a DDoS attack is a malicious attack that creates a flood of internet traffic affecting service performance. Please keep an eye out for updates in your inbox and on our network updates page here on X – @youfibre_status . We hope normal service will return quickly.”
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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We are seeing staff WFH on BT, EE, Plusnet all experiencing difficulties over the last hour, so might not just be Youfibre
Vodafone, Sky and Virgin seem unaffected.
(currently about 900 users working from a normal load of about 1800)
UK Public sector organsiation
Completely separate networks and ISPs, so at present I suspect that’s more likely to be an unrelated issue.
Unrelated I believe but we’re also seeing the same, BT users unable to connect to the VPN.
Also seeing this. Users on BT/PN/EE had issues from about 9:30, worse at 10am ish and then pretty catastrophic from about 10:20.
Suspect this isn’t just YF being hit. All users with issues are BT/EE/PN. Our (small number of known) YF users seemingly have been OK about an hour.
Thats been most of the week for the BT group. Tuesday was particularly bad as it was widely hit on all fronts.
@mark yeah, still looks like a second national issue, downdetector and X have lit up with complaints in the last hour
We saw our BGP sessions over LINX go down to BT and then come back just under 2 hours ago and we saw big packet loss to BT for around an hour. Unrelated to Youfibre, but definitely some network level issues with BT that looks similar to a DDoS.
I’ve had issues with web pages loading very slowly this morning (Plusnet). At first I thought it was Google Chrome as Microsoft seem to want to do everything they can to break it in Windows 11 but it’s been affecting Edge as well.
KCOM had issues between 9 and 11 this morning too
We have a number of BT business internet connections experiencing issues. I’ve spoken with our account manager and they’ve confirmed BT is aware of an ongoing DDoS incident.
BT is having majour BGP Issue
https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/as5400?dateRange=1d
data centers around the world are in meltdown
Trying to make it a really Black Friday for consumers affected! Seems the worst may be over, but maybe not for the customers whose details have been hacked.
It seems to me that since cloud flare went bad last month and Amazon Web services nothing has worked properly on the Web. Its as if we rely far too much on a few big IT providers who have not enough things in place to mitigate issues when they arise.