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BT network hit by second outage in two days as customers fume

Ongoing problems for telecoms firm

BT has hired another 1000 fibre engineers for its broadband rollouts across theUK
BT scrambles to fix second major outage on its network
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BT customers are experiencing outages for a second day in a row. The firm put an update on its status page acknowledging the problems, but did not give a specific reason for the fault, instead listing potential causes.

"A small number of our customers in the areas shown below may experience a loss of telephone and/or broadband services. We hope to have service restored as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience this may be causing," it said.

"Services can be affected by a variety of reasons such as damage caused by third parties or cable theft."

Several areas in London are affected, along with York, Nantwich and Totnes among others.

The outages are the second day in a row that customers have had to contend with poor to non-existent services.

BT released a statement on Wednesday blaming "power issues" for the outage. "We're sorry that some BT and Plusnet customers are experiencing problems accessing some internet services this morning," said the firm.

"This is due to power issues at one of our internet peering partners' sites in London. Engineers are working to fix things as fast as possible."

Problems with BT internet began at around 9am yesterday morning, and by 9.30 the telco's website listed a large number of local phone number codes that were experiencing problems.

Many of the faults carried through the morning. Telecity Group's co-location centre in London's Docklands was listed by customers and experts as being a potential source of the outage.

Customers were still suffering problems at the time of writing, ranging from extremely low speeds to no internet at all.

The timing of the outages is very unfortunate for BT, which earlier this week was the subject of a Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee report suggesting that the company should have better managed its broadband rollout programme across the UK.

BT's Openreach division has neglected certain areas of the country for fast broadband rollout, according to the report, while profiteering from funding such as rural broadband provision.

Ed Vaizey, former minister of state for culture, communications and creative industries, was a vocal cheerleader for Openreach and the government's apparent success in assisting the rollout.

However, when asked by V3 to back up BT and the government's boasts about 90 per cent coverage, Vaizey was unable to explain how the statistics were generated or whether they included fibre-to-the-home data.

Matthew Hancock has replaced Vaizey in the role, and will doubtless need to answer to his peers concerning BT's broadband situation.

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