UK ISP Sky Broadband Fixes Accidental Block of Bitbucket’s SSH Service
Internet provider Sky Broadband has resolved a fault that caused the ISP to accidentally block Secure Shell (SSH) communications to Bitbucket.org, which is a cloud-based Git repository hosting service owned by Atlassian that is designed for professional software (business) teams.
The problems started earlier this month after a number of Sky’s customers reported that their Secure Shell (SSH) connections to Bitbucket were struggling to work, which instead returned error messages like “client_loop: send disconnect: broken pipe” or “blocked by administration“.
Some customers found they were able to circumvent the problem by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), while others got around it by updating their ‘/.ssh/config‘ file to include the alternative host details for Bitbucket (bitbucket.org / Hostname altssh.bitbucket.org / Port 443). But others found the latter only resolved the problem for command-line git, while GitKraken (configured to use command-line git) was still problematic.
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Users who contacted Atlassian’s support department were later advised that the problem seemed to be coming from Sky’s side and, after a couple of weeks had passed since the problem began, the issue was finally resolved on Thursday (23rd April 2026).
A Sky Support Agent said:
“Thanks for your patience whilst we worked through this problem.
Our engineers have been working on the problem and have implemented a change. Can you check to see whether this has worked for you, please?”
The good news is that whatever Sky did seems to have corrected the problem, although it remains unclear why it occurred in the first place and Sky have since declined to provide that information. We do have to give Sky some credit here as, in our experience, technically niche issues like this can often take much longer to be identified and resolved by major ISPs. The situation is also a good reminder of why VPN’s can be so useful.
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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Did this “problem” only affect Bitbucket? If not, did the “change” fix other sites? The dearth of information is unfortunate.
Still, at least Sky addressed the problem relatively promptly. Compare that with Three’s longstanding intermittent connection problems, which are still present after 30 months.
Your mistake was using Three.
They’ve fixed the issue they have introduced first – most likely by some kind of AI driven automated paranoid security system.
Today’s security systems are predominantly autonomous and yes marketing insists ai has to be a feature.
I doubt that’s the issue here as it’d block other similar connections not just those to Atlassian from generic clients/browsers.
Would be nice to know the cause and fix.