Customers of UK Broadband ISP TalkTalk Report Major Service Outage UPDATE4

Customers of consumer broadband provider TalkTalk are this morning reporting a major service outage, which appears to have begun at around 7am and is currently impacting users across various different parts of the United Kingdom. At the same time we’re also seeing a significantly smaller, but still noticeable, peak in connectivity problems at BT.

At the time of writing TalkTalk has yet to update their Service Status page with news of the situation. Some initial feedback indicates that the physical line connection to the ISP is, in many cases, still active (all lights show as green), but only certain websites or online services appear to be loading / working.

The above could point to a problem with TalkTalk’s DNS servers or an issue with peering/routing (if BT’s issue is related then it may be the latter). We’re currently waiting to see if customers can get around the issue by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or third-party Domain Name System (DNS) provider like Quad9, Google Public DNS or others.

UPDATE 8:10am

Some testing conducted by one of ISPreview’s readers (credits to Joe) indicates that using a VPN does seem to resolve the issue, while others have found that adopting a third-party DNS also resolves the issues. We’re thus probably looking at some sort of issue that TalkTalk should be able to resolve relatively quickly, although it may still be disrupted for a time.

UPDATE 8:17am

We understand that some customers of TalkTalk Business are also being impacted.

UPDATE 8:20am

Some of TalkTalk’s customers report they’re starting to come back online.

UPDATE 11:11am

We’ve had comment from TalkTalk.

A TalkTalk spokesperson said:

“We apologise for any inconvenience caused to a number of customers who were impacted by a short network issue this morning. Full service was quickly restored, and we thank impacted customers for their patience.”