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BT's broadband network falls over again

By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 3 Nov 2010 at 15:30

BT has suffered another major network outage, just days after leaving tens of thousands of customers without a connection.

The technical issue that knocked out an unspecified piece of hardware in Edinburgh over the weekend appears to have struck again, leaving customers across the North of England and Northern Ireland without service.

“BT is currently experiencing localised disruption to some broadband services as a result of a similar technical issue that occurred over the weekend,” the company said in a statement.

“The issue has been fixed and broadband services are being restored to affected customers," it said. "Customers that are having difficulty accessing broadband are advised to reboot their equipment.”

The technical issues have not been made public, but one reader wrote to PC Pro suggesting the original problem at the weekend was due to a failed multiplexer that reverted to its backup card, but died completely when an engineer tried to replace the initial failed card.

Although BT said the problem was fixed, its Twitter BTCare feed was still flagging problems from customers.

"I'm very sorry, there have been major broadband outages over the last few days and most likely you have been affected by these," was the care team's response to one frustrated Twitterer.

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User comments

makes me glad our office runs on a THUS fibre circuit.

By IainNIX on 3 Nov 2010

Has the Cyber War started?

Do I smell a cyber war? It wasn't long ago there was that attack on Iranian power stations running Siemens infrastructure crafted "by a national Agency" as some security boffins reported at the time.

Since then there have been far too many outages of ISPs, telcos, power companies both in and out of the UK to be pure coincidence... plus there was a problem at the London Stock Exchange. There was even a power cut in Switzerland (I've lived here for more than ten years and it was the first one I ever experienced here) and the Bank of International Settlements is located in the area of the power cut.

All these places have one common factor: they are important cogs in Western infrastructural systems.

By SwissMac on 3 Nov 2010