Following the advice on the status update i was 'manually connecting' from the router interface.

It wouldn't authenticate though.

I finally decided to clear the username and saved password. Re enter them manually and that seems to be what has worked.

Somehow the saved details were corrupted by the outage.

Very poor decision to go ahead with planned maintenance so soon after a major outage.

There must have been many customers still offline, I couldn't get through on the phones last night, often a message with 'half hour call waiting'. Same again this morning. This must have been because so many were still disconnected.

That maintenance should have been postponed in my opinion.

Router was the 582.

Needed the username/password details deleted and re-entered.

In reply to a post by RoosterUK:

Very poor decision to go ahead with planned maintenance so soon after a major outage.

But to most it probably wasn't a major outage. It was also planned BT work, which is taking place almost continuously at the moment.

Service: Broadband
Posted: Mon, Oct 28 2013 at 12:49:51
Subject: Planned BT Network Maintenance - Week commencing 28th October 2013

When's this work happening?
Early hours of most days this week.

What does it affect?
Broadband connectivity.

How long will it take?
Up to six hours each time.

What does the work involve?
Although we've not received any notifications from our suppliers about any major maintenance work scheduled to take place this week, there are a number of smaller exchange works most nights of the week that may cause smaller outages at individual exchanges. This work typically takes place between Midnight and 6am.

Am I likely to notice the work?
Yes, there's a chance that you may be disconnected from the internet for a period of time during the maintenance window.

Is there anything else I need to know?
Any customers having problems connecting once the maintenance is complete are advised to log into their router interface and click connect.

Ok, the effect on you was for some reason dramatic, but for me it wasn't even noticeable - similar to an earlier poster, you can see it by clicking the BQM link in my sig.

There was an identical email about BT work last week and the week before, w/c the 14th. I haven't checked back further than that. PlusNet did service updates on the 17th, 21st (two different things), and an emergency fix in the daytime on the 24th. Then this one last night.

It's hard to see how they could avoid the ongoing clearly widespread BT stuff.

The planned maintenance I was referring to was Plusnets own, on their internal systems.

Planned Website and Internal Systems Maintenance - Monday 28th October 11.30pm-Tuesday 29th October 6.00am
28/10/2013 @ 16:59

When is this work happening?
Overnight tonight and into tomorrow morning, 29th October.

What does it affect?
Access to our website and internal systems.

How long will it take?
About six hours.

What does the work involve?
We're rolling a number of system updates, improvements and problem fixes.

Am I likely to notice the work?
Possibly. Our website will be unavailable for the majority of the maintenance window and holding pages will be in place. Our customer support centre will have limited access to customers' account details during this time.

Is there anything else I need to know?
No.

Kind regards,

Matt Taylor
Customer Support

I'm not sure what caused the loss of service, somehow doubt it was the BT Network updates as the timing was wrong. Outage started around 5pm, Network updates would have been overnight.

There must have been a lot of people who couldn't reconnect as the phones were swamped all evening, and again this morning.

Having just had an outage, and with phone queues that long I don't think it was sensible to go ahead with their own internal maintenance. It needlessly created an issue whereby customers who couldn't reconnect were phoning up and hearing a message saying systems down- no fault finding, no website status page and all at a time when support was clearly needed for a large number of customers.

Have a look at the call chart, it clearly wasn't just me or a few others.

Call centre chart

Current call wait over an hour. Why is it like that if issue was resolved last night?

Even if the technical fault is fixed, customers clearly still need support to get back online, even now.

Guess I was lucky can't say I noticed any outage at 5.00pm up here and I'm usually asleep around three in the morning

In reply to a post by RoosterUK:

Have a look at the call chart, it clearly wasn't just me or a few others.

Call centre chart

Current call wait over an hour. Why is it like that if issue was resolved last night?

Even if the technical fault is fixed, customers clearly still need support to get back online, even now.

Looking at that chart, today looks identical yesterday? Neither is satisfactory in my opinion, but I think you just disproved your point rather than proved it.

Have a look at the graph of the number of users online. Section 2 of this page. Looks to be only gateway ptw-ag04 that went down, for a short while.

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 29-Oct-13 12:57:03)

Haha, perhaps you're right!

I haven't looked at the call centre chart recently (other than last 24 hrs), so perhaps it is swamped everyday.

I can't see any way to see previous days charts just that one showing last 24 hrs.

I thought that chart showed a marked rise following the 5pm outage and same high volume again this morning. But as you say maybe it's like that everyday at the moment.

If you know how to see historical data for the call centre please share!

In reply to a post by RoosterUK:

Yep, really annoying to see 'issue resolved' when it clearly isn't.

They're tweeting issue resolved as well, despite all the 'still not working' tweets.

Can't get through on the phone either.

Hopefully the techs aren't as deluded as CS and are actually working on it.

typical PR game.

ISP will say resolved go away to visitors on their status pages, the tech's meanwhile will be tyring to actually fix it.