Power issues have caused outage to BT’s broadband and Plusnet services, leaving thousands of users struggling to access the internet.
The UK’s biggest internet service provider (ISP) with 10 million customers, reported outages in several areas at about 9am. BT said it was aware and working on a fix at 9.10am, but is facing outcry on social media as users vent their frustration.
A BT spokesperson said: “We’re sorry that some BT and Plusnet customers are experiencing problems accessing some internet services this morning. This is due to power issues at one of our internet peering partners’ sites in London. Engineers are working to fix things as fast as possible.”
BT said the problems appeared to be mainly affecting customers in London and the south-east, but thousands of reports from users to the Down Detector website placed issues in Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Milton Keynes, Leeds, Bristol, Nottingham and Leicester.
The ISPs service status page indicates it has detected issues across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Some users have suggested that the problem is linked to BT’s Domain Name System (DNS), which translates URLs such as theguardian.com into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses so that a computer can connect to a server and display a website.
Changing your DNS settings to a third-party, such as Google’s public DNS, could solve the issue.
The internet outage comes a day after BT was warned that it must “put its house in order” by MPs or face a break-up after failing to invest potentially hundreds of millions of pounds a year in its network arm Openreach. However, BT said on Tuesday that it had invested more than £1bn a year in its infrastructure and that it was improving service levels. Openreach provides more than 25m telecoms lines across the UK between the company’s exchanges and homes and businesses.
The UK’s telecoms regulator, Ofcom, is due to make a decision on whether Openreach, which provides internet services for competing ISPs such as TalkTalk and Sky, should be spun off from the rest of BT.
BT said the problem was fixed sometime after 12pm. A spokesperson said: “Around 10% of customers’ internet usage was affected following power issues at one of our internet connection partners’ sites in London. The issue has now been fixed and services have been restored.”
