Power failure causes BT Broadband service outage

Oct 4 2011 / By Richard Patterson

It’s been just days after Virgin Media made some comments about how much better Fujitsu’s fibres are compared to that of BT Broadband’s. It’s also been less than a week that BT Broadband was upgrading and expanding its services to offer doubly fast broadband speeds in the North East. It’s been a mix of good and bad news lately for one of the UK’s leading providers, but it’s only bad news for BT today.

Earlier this afternoon, BT Broadband experienced a huge broadband failure all over the United Kingdom due to a power failure at an exchange in Birmingham. An estimated 5% of BT’s customers have been affected, and while that may seem like a small percentage, that already translates to over hundreds of thousands of users.

Of the incident, a BT spokesperson has said: “We can confirm that, as a result of a power failure at one of our major exchanges, some customers may have experienced loss of broadband service for a brief period this afternoon.” The connections began to falter at around 13:00 BST. Some users had their connections restored by 15:00, although others experienced a longer downtime throughout the afternoon.

The spokesperson added: “We have been doing our very best to keep customers informed. All services have now been restored, with the majority of BT’s consumer broadband customers’ service being restored within just one hour. Some business customers’ broadband service may have been affected for a slightly longer period. 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 Broadband

The service outage was especially infuriating for business owners and establishments. Of course, when your company relies heavily on the Internet and broadband services to rack in sales and facilitate operations, any outages will obviously and ultimately result in financial loss.

Some businesses vented their frustrations by contacting a local media outlet. Daniel Morris from London said, “Really frustrating for a small business as we are so reliant on the internet. Best thing was the BT helpline advising customers to logon to BT.com if they can’t get through on the phone – not easy logging in without Internet!”

The director of Pond Group, Greg Gilles, also added: ”We were unable, along with the rest of the country, to get hold of BT for confirmation and had to rely on Twitter for unconfirmed updates.”

Are you unhappy with BT? Tell us what you think by leaving a BT broadband review so other consumers can see what you think of them.

Source – BBC