Survey Claims 41 Percent of UK People Hit by Broadband Outages
A new Uswitch commissioned Opinium survey of 2,000 UK adults, which was conducted between 31st October and 4th November 2025, has claimed that 41% of respondents experienced at least one loss of broadband connectivity in the past 12 months and “15 million Brits” (67%) experienced outages lasting for three hours or more.
The survey goes on to claim that internet outages totalled 238.7 million hours in the past year, which is said to be costing the UK economy an estimated £1.4bn in lost work hours. Some 21% of those affected said they are having to suffer through 3 hours or longer outages “more than once a week“. Problems at the broadband provider were given as the top reason for prolonged outages by 37% of respondents, while 33% blamed it on power cuts and 27% attributed it to their router not working.
Furthermore, 49% of adults rely on their home Wi-Fi for work, and for home workers who have been affected by outages it is estimated to have cost them an average of £46.40, with 12% losing over £100 annually. Some 18% even said they were unable to work as a result and 28% of those who use a home internet connection for work purposes had to increase their working hours to offset the downtime.
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In terms of the regional results. Edinburgh and London take the spot as the UK’s outage capital, with 48% of residents suffering disconnection. But this falls to 18% in Belfast, followed by Cardiff (30%), Brighton (31%), and Sheffield (32%). But the sample size of this survey really is too small to be credible on this front.
The UK Top 5 Outage Capitals
(highest % of residents experiencing an outage)
Edinburgh (48%)
London (48%)
Bristol (45%)
Norwich (43%)
Liverpool (43%)
Finally, 78% of those who experienced an outage said they did not receive compensation and 9% had their compensation request denied. But in fairness, Ofcom’s scheme for Automatic Compensation only kicks in for service outages that last longer than 2 working days, which is rare (most outages only last a few minutes or hours).
Naturally, we have a few comments on this, not least of which is the fact that we haven’t actually seen any hard independent data evidence to corroborate the above findings (in fairness, it’s a difficult thing to study with any accuracy). Opinions surveys are of course also best taken with a pinch of salt, since they don’t always reflect reality.
In addition, more reliable full fibre (FTTP) networks have grown in both coverage and take-up in recent years, while more people are now back working from an office (i.e. fewer people are now at home to spot when outages occur). Not to mention that it may be considered a bit misleading to term the overall result as a “broadband outage” when you’re also including power cuts into the mix; something ends users could often mitigate with their own backups, if so desired.
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The other issue typically stems from whether a “broadband outage” is actually caused by an internet provider or is instead an issue within the home, such as a local network, viruses / hacker, router, Wi-Fi or end-user device problem. Surveys like this often can’t correctly distinguish the difference, which tends to result in everything being blamed on the broadband connection, while the wider picture may be more complex.
However, modern broadband networks can certainly still be disrupted in all sorts of different ways, such as via weather damage (flooding, fallen trees etc.), third-party street works cutting through cables, fires, power cuts at an exchange / data centre and deeper faults within an ISP’s network (e.g. hardware failure, routing / peering or DNS mistakes etc.). Most of these are quickly resolved, but others can take days or even longer (complex incidents in remote rural areas are usually slower to resolve).
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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This might be quite misleading, most people seem to think “WIFI” is the Internet, and a local WIFI issue, or maybe pulled cable by the cat or a baby or whatever, might have been perceived as an actual internet outage, maybe a service fault by someone like Netflix as another example, I expect the % is not realistic.
It says 41% of respondents, so like most of these things there is a substantial sample bias. People who have no problems are far less likely to respond.
That as well, I agree with your point, usually polls have an intended result.
What will be a bigger issue is the move of TV to IP based services, rather that Sat or Freeview, and THEN getting extended outages… the masses will revolt!
A fair few people already rely on broadband for their TV or video entertainment. But yes, when Freely or what ever it becomes, replace Freeview then it may cause a bit of a stir when things go wrong.
I remember when I was young and analogue terrestrial TV had a few breakdowns, either the studio or the transmitter, things are more reliable now, I presume, not use Freeview for years.
Years ago it was something we expected and put up with it, people these days want things to work 24/7.
When my broadband went down a couple of weeks ago, I just took out my book and read, I could have also listened to some music or the radio. An hour or so later, it was working again.
These things happen, but the problem is, we tend to rely on it more than we ever did.
I certainly do as I have a lot of smart home stuff, my heating, lighting, a load of smart plugs, but thankfully, I can still turn thinmgs on normally if need be.
Yes, I am also sceptical. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a 3+hr outage, not for at least 20 years, and that’s across multiple homes and multiple service types (migrating from ADSL to VDSL to FTTP), albeit always on Openreach infrastructure in my case. Perhaps I’m just lucky!
No, not 3 hours, maybe an hour, if that, I have had slow-downs that have lasted a few hours, but still able to access, just a bit slow.
We are currently on day 48 with no broadband, since someone cut our full fibre line while trimming branches back from a newly condemned telephone pole alongside a 60 mph ‘A’ road 1200m from our house. We’ve been given a number of dates when it should have been fixed, the latest (fingers crossed!) is next weekend.
‘41% of respondents experienced at least one loss of broadband connectivity in the past 12 months and “15 million Brits” (67%) experienced outages lasting for three hours or more’
How can 41% of people have any outage but a larger percentage have a long outage?
It’ll be 67% of the 42%
I had a bunch of outages in 2024 with Zen, one of which was 5 days long. It became such a problem its the reason I switched from BT FTTP via Zen and moved to CityFibre via IDNet. There is no good reason for that many outages but smokeping showed a bunch more in the middle of the night as well, beyond the ones I was seeing in the middle of the day. Had zero on CityFibre so its looking a lot more reliable. I wouldn’t be so quick to judge and say this is peoples wifi, I have experienced it and my local network is definitely not the issue here its worked perfectly throughout (most of the machines connected via ethernet for a start).
I am also very sceptic about this survey but think the reality is still much higher than what the average reader of this site thinks. I have two ISPs and run them on fail over. Both ISPs give me a public IP (ie non-CGNAT) and I disable IPV6 on my network. I also set two different public DNS servers on my devices via DHCP and do not use my ISP’s DNS. All of this improvements give me a true 100% up service. But even so the alerts I get from my router when the ISPs connections are down are minimal. Having said that I know Community Fibre (one of the ISPs) have had several downtimes due to DNS and CGNAT issues.
On top of people buying cheap ISP services like CGNAT and not setting up non-ISP DNS systems they also use cheap wifi mesh systems, wifi extenders, powerline adapters, etc all of which are known to be unreliable. Finally if you work from home and are using wifi you are doing something wrong. A permanent or semi permanent working position should always be wired. You get what you pay for…
I really think these polling companies should be shamed (if that’s possible) for putting out these obviously false or misleading claims through their supposed polls.
I’m from Sweden and the UK’s broadband infrastructure now holds up fairly well even compared to ours (especially in more remote areas), so I have my doubts here.
There is simply too much miserable-ism propaganda in the UK over things that really aren’t that bad in practice. Thing is, people outside the UK take it at face value, and a ton of people end up with a completely false view of the facts.
Maybe I’ve been lucky but in the 4 years since I switched to FTTP I’ve only had 1 1/2 hour outage with the LOS light showing on the ONT (fatal last words, I know). Openreach reckon the fault rate with FTTP is a third of that with copper so fault rates should fall as the country makes the switch.