Part of Fusion Fibre’s UK Broadband Network Suffering Protracted Outage UPDATE3
Rural network builder and ISP Fusion Fibre Group, which have deployed a few of its own FTTP broadband networks to various remote rural communities and also sells services via other altnets (e.g. CityFibre, Freedom Fibre, FullFibre, ITS Technology etc.), appears to be suffering from a protracted service outage in some areas that started yesterday.
The problems appear to have started just after 7:30pm yesterday and remain ongoing. Customers in several different locations, such as Cambois and Startforth, report that their connections went down in the evening and have yet to return. All the locations we’ve seen complaints about seem to be part of the provider’s own (on-net) full fibre network.
Meanwhile, those that have attempted to contact the Fusion’s support lines appear to be struggling to get through, which is partly because they don’t offer 24-hour support. But once opened today the support lines quickly became busy with others trying to get through. Sadly, Fusion Fibre are one of those ISPs that doesn’t seem to believe in having a public Service Status page for such incidents, which we consider to be essential for every ISP.
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Sample Complaint 1 (David)
“My isp Fusion Fibre formerly Factco has been down since 8pm last night, the whole village of Startforth is off and other location according to down detector. Couldn’t phone customer service last night as not open, no 24 hr support, called this morning just engaged and when you do get through to technical support menu [it’s] on hold with no one picking up.”
Sample Complaint 2 (Philip)
“Tried calling multiple times and was engaged. Eventually not engaged but then was just on hold for an hour instead. Gave up after the hour.”
Sample Complaint 3 (Rae)
“Been calling since 8am all I get is “user busy”. Nightmare at work with no services!”
ISPreview has attempted to contact the provider, although our PR contact appears to have left the provider and so we’re unsure whether the message got through (we’re told it was forwarded).
UPDATE 4th August 2026 @ 6:50am
ISPreview still hasn’t had any contact from the ISP, but some customers have reported receiving the following email at around 4-5pm yesterday. Some customers still seemed to be offline last night, so we’re waiting to see what the situation looks like this morning as people wake up.
Copy of Fusion Fibre’s Customer Email
Dear Customer,
We wanted to provide a quick update on today’s broadband service disruption.
The issue is now being resolved, and you should start to see your broadband service restore itself shortly. We expect connections to come back online over the next few hours.
There’s no need to restart your equipment at this stage, but if your service hasn’t returned once we’ve confirmed the issue has been resolved, please get in touch with our Customer Support team.
Thank you for your patience and understanding while we worked to restore your service.
Kind Regards,
The Fusion Fibre Group Team
UPDATE 4th August 2026 @ 8:49am
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Fusion Fibre has just sent some customers another email, which confirms that the issues are in fact ongoing.
Dear Customer,
We wanted to share another update on the current broadband issue.
We know many of you were expecting your service to be restored by now, and we’re sorry that this hasn’t been the case for everyone.
Our engineers have opened a further investigation into the remaining issues and are working as quickly as possible to get affected services back online.
Thank you for bearing with us while we continue to work on this. We’ll provide another update around midday with the latest information.
We appreciate your continued patience and understanding while we work to restore service.
Kind regards,
The Fusion Fibre Group Team
UPDATE 4th August 2026 @ UPDATE 4:41pm
Customers of Fusion Fibre appear to be getting back online and the provider has also issued another statement, which attempts to explain what went wrong.
Fusion Fibre Statement to Customers
“The reason for the outage was administration error between ourselves and a third party who provides a number of services, including our inbound phone services, however due to the commercial confidentiality of our agreements, we cannot be anymore specific. The error was entirely ours and we’re working with our third-party carrier to restore services as soon as we can. This outage and the HMRC petition aren’t related.
We appreciate that our communication could have been better during this outage for which we wholeheartedly apologise – we are currently in the process of upgrading our management and monitoring systems to enable better communication with our customers. We are also developing our CRM so that we can perform better in these unfortunate circumstances.
We will be crediting every impacted customer for a full months service as well as, in the near future, holding local drop in sessions to listen to our customers concerns.”
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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Absolutely shocking in this day and age that we still have no internet 18 hours later. We have sky glass so can’t even watch TV as it streams content. We will be changing our ISP as this is not good enough
What SLA are you paying for?
Now you know some reasons why altnets are cheap: no network monitoring, no 24×7 network operations, no customer-facing support ticketing system – and no customer comms (as reported).
An outage of this scale should have fired off alerts to on-call engineers.
Nearly 16.5 hours since it went down, I asked them at 10.45am to be kept up to date and nothing has been forthcoming coming, how ridiculous is that, hopefully a mass of lost customers might make them sit up and take notice.
Well now they have a winding petition against them it might never return. I assume you will be allowed to switch to someone else?
Fusion Fibre doesn’t have a status page, but FACTO’s is currently still up (https://status.factco.co.uk) and showing all networks operational and no incidents reported yesterday or today.
Yeah, that stauspage requires manual intervention as in someone needs to log in and update it, it’s also old and not used anymore.
Yeh. I did want to append enclose my comment in a pseudo sarc tag, but from experience they get stripped.
I represent over twenty users in a single block in central York. There have been some serious errors of leadership here and it has exposed Fusion Fibre as inexperienced and not at all grown up. Firstly, it is now 18:30 on Monday, nearly 24 hours since the failure. Were technical teams deployed immediately last night or were we all left to languish until they deployed this morning? Either way a failure to repair a technical fault after 24 hours is just disgraceful – this would be headline news for a major ISP. Second, the tech desk is only open for limited hours. This incident represents a crisis for Fusion Fibre, but they have failed to have a plan to cover this. Technical advice to callers was not required as everything was bust, so anybody could have been deployed to phones to relay this message to callers; take managers and everybody off sales for the day and deploy them on the phones – customers first! Third, there has been zero communication to customers even though doing so would be the work of a few minutes for a leadership team. Nothing on the website. Who on earth took a decision NOT to communicate to customers? Insanity and breaks all of the rules of a customer facing business. The leadership team should be ashamed at such a decision and the board should be looking closely at who is responsible for such a fundamental error of judgement. A quick message would have saved the frustration of thousands of customers and cooled the situation. Madness. Finally, somebody in authority please listen to the music played whilst in the telephone queue. It starts off ok but at about minute four the crescendo rises to an ear splitting peak that nearly blows your phone speakers. Who on earth picked this? Who supervised the selection? After several years of relatively trouble free service, this incident has made everyone aware that any grown up facade is tissue thin. Please have a full and frank Debrief Fusion Fibre, do some serious work on your business continuity plan and ask some serious questions whether your decision making processes are correct and led by suitable people.
A long outage where the company is explaining at every moment what’s going on, what they are doing to fix it, how long they estimate the fix will be etc etc… is a very different customer experience to a long outage of total radio silence. Have some respect for your customers Fusion Fibre.
https://caseboard.io/cases/0bd52411-43f1-4ab1-9182-eba70aa283b6
This doesn’t look good.
Perhaps it’s not just HMRC they haven’t paid for something.
Interesting that some customers have had a bland email. I haven’t even had that!
Fusion Fibre clearly don’t have any understanding of crisis communications. Any outage is bad, but a company can soften the blow by communicating proactively, quickly, fully and often.
As I hadn’t heard from Fusion Fibre, I emailed the CEO directly. I guessed his email address correctly, but guess what? Fusion Fibre has configured Microsoft 365 to prevent customer emails reaching him. Another sign of a company that holds its customers in contempt.
It’s incredible that this forum is my only source of updates on this outage. No official status page or form of communication from Fusion Fibre.
They provide internet for a large number of creative businesses in Liverpool – All currently out.
As of 15:00 there are at least two more emails, apparently from Fusion, floating about the internet.
One email explains that the issue was due to an administrative error (made by Fusion) between themselves and a third-party supplier (who also supplies their phone service), which they can’t go into due to commercial confidentiality. That email states that customers will be compensated with a month’s free service.
Another email, which I have only seen part of, explicitly states that the issue is not related to the winding up order with HMRC.
An administrative error with a supplier covers a very broad spectrum of issues, from someone issuing an erroneous technical instruction to a payment not being made. It appears that Fusion are planning to leave the Internet to speculate on whereabouts their error was on that spectrum.
Live in Cambois – SE Northumberland. Apparently those of us in village who use Fusion after now all back on from around 4pm. An article was shared on a local FB page, that Fusion are in trouble with HMRC and a winding up order had been issued. Note company have not said this at all, and implied it was a technical error, via emails. We don’t know whether this has been resolved or not as in the short/mid/long term viability of the company.
It’s these kinds of events that put me off signing up with an AltNet. They just don’t seem as robust, either technically or financially, as some of the larger traditional ISP’s. I know that they are cheap, sometimes even unbelievably cheap, but I’d rather have a reliable service even if it costs a few pounds a month more.
FF customer in a York village. A week since the (start of) the outage which for us lasted just short of 48 hours. Couple of belated emails which explained nothing early last week. Nothing since. Do they really think customers will renew given their attitude and lack of comms. Disgraceful contemptuous treatment of your customer base FF. You ought to be ashamed.