At approximately 9:13am this morning a large number of broadband ISP connections in Birmingham and the surrounding UK Midlands area went offline in what has since turned into a major outage for the region. BT are known to be aware and have issued the following statement.

List of affected UK telephone exchanges:
* Leamington Spa
* Hereford
* Banbury
* Worcester Central
* Summertown
* Gloucester
* Bromsgrove
* Stroud
* Tewkesbury
* Worcester St Peter
* Solihull
* Birmingham Central
* Streetly
* Northern
* Birmingham Shirley
* Droitwich
* Erdington
* Sutton Coldfield
* Acocks Green
* Selly Oak
* Castle Bromwich
* Redditch Old Town

It's feared that thousands of people could have been left without broadband as a result of an unspecified fault with the Birmingham Remote Access Server (RAS). A RAS is typically home to thousands of connections from lots of different telephone exchanges and any failure here can have a significant impact.

Most RAS faults are solved quite quickly although this one has been occurring for longer than usual and, at present, BT has been unable to issue an ETA for its fix. We will update again later.

UPDATE 12:14pm

No update from BT, although reports indicate that some broadband lines are now returning to normal.

UPDATE 1:42pm

Several ISPs reporting that their broadband lines are now all back to normal.