Broadband outage affects thousands

All leading ISPs were affected by a glitch in service provision from BT Wholesale on Tuesday evening.

The fault meant that hundreds of thousands of broadband users were unable to connect to their ISPs for around three hours. BT Wholesale has issued an apology and says it is investigating the cause.

A spokesperson for AOL said: “It happened at about 5.30pm. Any of our users that wanted to connect were unable to do so although the service remained for those already connected. It was fixed after about 2.5 hours but then there was a bottleneck period where many users tried to get back on.”

“This hasn’t happened before and we are waiting for BT to tell us what the cause was. Perhaps a glitch or a problem with an upgrade – we don’t know yet.”

All ISPs that operate high-speed internet services from BT Wholesale were hit by the outage, including BT’s own broadband service.

Initial reports from BT suggest that software problems on three servers led to congestion on BT's network creating a logjam of people looking to connect to their ISP.

In a statement BT Wholesale said: "Broadband users may have experienced authentication issues caused by software problems increasing congestion. The issue was identified at 16:30. Any customers already logged on should not have been affected.

"BT restored full service across the platform at 19:30. BT is undertaking a full investigation of this issue and regrets any inconvenience that this may have caused service providers and end users during this period.”