BT Suffers Major Broadband Outage

BT has confirmed that a "power issue" at a major exchange in Birmingham is causing problems for broadband customers across the UK.

Customers have reported problems from as far afield as Belfast, Edinburgh, Swansea and London.

Yep, mate working for BT in Belfast saying they're getting a lot of calls about it.

No problems with my Infinity connection in Bangor, N.Ireland though.

in derry BT business broaband off now for 2 hours. Thank god for three mobile, backup 3g now running office with 8 staff with 6mbps downloads

Derry Northern Ireland. Will check my Infinity connection at home later.

Seems to affecting more business customers for some reason. The BT service status messages are as succinct as ever...to the point they tell you nothing of any interest.

Yep it's major. Just logged in to our work monitoring portal (we monitor data connections) and I'm seeing around a couple of hundred connections (all xDSL broadband) down since 12:30. All over the country - Glasgow to Exeter.

Edited by aquilla (Mon 03-Oct-11 15:09:56)

back on in Oxford. routers automatically reconnected without any user intervention required.

In reply to a post by aquilla:

Yep it's major. Just logged in to our work monitoring portal (we monitor data connections) and I'm seeing around a couple of hundred connections (all xDSL broadband) down since 12:30. All over the country - Glasgow to Exeter.

Cue the legions of misinformed numpties invading the BBC website to give off like they were some Guardian commentator.

Dozens of replies from people without the faintest notion of how telephony or the internet works but they all know how to sort it out of course

Edited by orly (Mon 03-Oct-11 15:24:02)

Got a link to the MSO?

http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/mso.php has nothing, or at least non of the places look like Birmingham

http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/service_status/se...

BBC News article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15154020

Was looking for the BT MSO wording.

Sounds more like a BT POP may have gone bang. In terms of failure while they say power issue, that could easily mean something blew itself up, thus making any backup power less useful.

Alas redundancy costs money, as any business will know, when it comes to planning for these things and other possibilities

In reply to a post by orly:

In reply to a post by aquilla:

Yep it's major. Just logged in to our work monitoring portal (we monitor data connections) and I'm seeing around a couple of hundred connections (all xDSL broadband) down since 12:30. All over the country - Glasgow to Exeter.

Cue the legions of misinformed numpties invading the BBC website to give off like they were some Guardian commentator.

Dozens of replies from people without the faintest notion of how telephony or the internet works but they all know how to sort it out of course

..I was moved to try and inject a little sanity but I'll probably just get loads of down votes. Posting responses to articles on the BBC site is like widdling into a headwind most of the time.

Edited by Andrue (Mon 03-Oct-11 15:53:54)

Interesting. As a Plusnet (owned by BT) customer, I would have assumed BT's problems would gravitate to Plusnet too. No probs at 20+ miles North of Edinburgh.

I've quickly been scanning the comments on the BBC website and this brought a smile:

51 MINUTES AGO
This is pathetic, BT Openreach, revived huge amounts of public funding to update the countries ADSL backbone then they implement a single point of failure for the ENTIRE country, this is something that needs to be reviewed in parliament.

Where was the UPS? Where was the emergency power generation? this sort of failure should be impossible, its a key indicator of BT taking continual shortcuts.

You'd think reading the BBC site that the world had ended.

Was not aware the whole country was offline, and wonder what this huge amount of public money is?

Not too unusual for redudant power to a device to be dead, e.g. smoking/exploding PSU cause issues to device, then no hot swap replacement available.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Was not aware the whole country was offline, and wonder what this huge amount of public money is?

Not too unusual for redudant power to a device to be dead, e.g. smoking/exploding PSU cause issues to device, then no hot swap replacement available.

I'm waiting for the bit where it's debated in parliament.

From what I've seen so far Andrew, it could be a BRAS / authentication problem (hardware failure etc) but I'm not giving it too much though. I'm not in work so I don't have to deal with our customer who are affected; I'm on a working C&W connection; and it's sunny outside.

North Hertfordshire was down for 50 mins. Looks like it was fairly major.

In reply to a post by aquilla:

BBC News article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15154020

"We're having some problems posting your comment at the moment. Sorry. We're doing our best to fix it"

Had to laugh at the BBC site

yeah, was an authentication issue for me, line remained synced with dial-tone, just would not accept username/password. luckily my two ADSL circuits were the 2nd backup for the two main circuits (One from Neos and the other VM). If you want to do it properly, get three carriers involved.

In reply to a post by clmfsh:

yeah, was an authentication issue for me, line remained synced with dial-tone, just would not accept username/password.

Same here (Oxfordshire).
Eventually came back after just over an hour but with the internet being close to unuseable (around ISDN speed).
BT speedtest kept saying 34000kbps (give or take) but even the most basic of web-pages taking an age to load. Speedtest.net giving around 96kbps!!!
Back now, but still not quite right (obviously some major re-routing involved).

No problems here at all. Speeds and pings completely unaffected.

I believe I'm routed through Edinburgh though (not sure about that though!)

That must explain why Orange WBC (hosted by BTw) failed to authenticate (LCP/CHAPS) both today & yesterday early PM. It;s been OK now for 3h 15m.

In reply to a post by orly:

You'd think reading the BBC site that the world had ended.

..and if you couldn't it probably had

In reply to a post by camieabz:

Interesting. As a Plusnet (owned by BT) customer, I would have assumed BT's problems would gravitate to Plusnet too. No probs at 20+ miles North of Edinburgh.

Its very random, I've got four BT business broadband lines up in Moray, two are working, two are down. Odd.

Hi there,
i experienced this too, i have just got a strange ping on speedtest.net my best ever! it is usually around 35-40ms but look at this! Result
and my bt business connection was also offline here in cornwall near newquay today, so was our office! between 12:30~ish and 13:30~ish
My Home BT Business Broadband Ping Snapshot

In reply to a post by orly:

I believe I'm routed through Edinburgh though (not sure about that though!)

Unfortunately I'm located right in the problem area
I had a sync throughout the period (mainly because I'm not actually in Birmingham and the sync is just between home & cabinet) but was unable to get internet traffic due to the problem in Birmingham.
AIUI the problem was a power outage in a Birmingham exchange and my routing does go in that direction (Speedtest.net selects a test server based on lowest ping, and it always picks either a Birmingham or Coventry server).

Pretty much back to normal now.