BTIgnite shut down

BTignite suffered a serious outage today which closed down the network for more than two hours.

The network was shut down at 9.45am this morning and was mostly running by noon, although there were still customers without a service at 3.30pm.

Nick Grayson, technical consultant at Zen Internet, a reseller of BT Wholesale's ADSL connections, said his helpdesk had been bombarded with angry calls.

"We've taken around 170 calls on this today," he said. "All BT told us this morning was that there was a major problem and that they were expecting a fix by 11.43.am. We thought it odd they were so precise, but it was up around noon."

A BT spokesperson confirmed that the network collapsed after a fault with the Colossus IP backbone, but refused to say why it had crashed so spectacularly. "Our rivals might be able to use the information," she said.

However, the outage was the second in a few days for BTOpenworld customers.Last week their service was cut for nearly ten hours, and technical service staff fixing the fault at 10am advised vnunet.com that they "had no idea how long it would take to fix" and that mail had to be switched off because there was "no back-up server in place."

This week a BTOpenworld spokesman denied this saying that the ISP had a multiple level system of back-up servers in place and was still investigating why its fail safe system didnt work last week.