BT outage cripples broadband connections across the UK

BT has suffered an embarrassing power failure at a major exchange in Birmingham that left thousands of customers around the UK without broadband connections.

The fault was first logged on the firm's status page at 13:45 and acknowledged on its Twitter account, and BT said in a statement that it was working to restore services for affected customers.

"We can confirm that some customers may currently be experiencing loss of broadband service. Our engineers are on site and the majority of customers' services have already been restored," the company said.

"We are working to restore service to remaining customers as soon as possible this afternoon. Should any customers continue to experience difficulty in accessing their broadband service, they are advised to turn their Hub or modem off and on again."

BT later confirmed it had fixed the problem for most customers by late afternoon.

"All services have now been restored, with the majority of BT's consumer broadband customers' service being restored within just one hour," it said.

"Some business customers' broadband service may have been affected for a slightly longer period," it said.

V3 asked BT what had caused the outage but it said it was unable to confirm at present.

The outage will not be welcome as BT continues to battle with Virgin Media for market dominance in the increasingly competitive broadband space, both firms heavily promoting their fibre products.