back to article BT broadband packs up again - second big outage in a fortnight

BT has once again suffered what appears to be a major network outage affecting what the company described as "multiple areas". A simple update on BT's customer status page currently reads: We're really sorry but we've got a problem at the moment affecting our broadband service, which means that some of our customers will be …

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  1. J P

    Perhaps they're just warming up for the Olympics when everyone in the South East is supposed to be working from home?

    1. theloon
      FAIL

      In a BT video interview a few months back they actually suggested everyone needs to their normal work places, as their domestic bandwidth will be limited during the Olympics. Good to see that after 5 years of planning they have added the capacity needed. Naturally this video has been deleted, but I was fortunate enough to watch the web-broadcast live.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Our outdated networks of phone lines and connections are creaking with overload.

      Today it goes down here and there, tomorrow the country and on Tuesday, at 11.23am the world!

      Doom I say, doooooooom!

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Hmmm

      Wonder where all their engineering resources are at the moment?

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: Hmmm

        Up a pole in deepest Norfolk. Once he's done that he'll get onto the broadband.

  2. Matt Williams
    Meh

    One of our BT Infinity lines fell over this morning so we switched over to the other one which is fine. If they both fall over, I'll be bothered to try and fix it.

    My point is, though, that I would be willing to bear a hundred years of such service from BT in preference to ever having to deal with TalkTalk again. A couple of days ago they started to try and invoice me again for a service that they cancelled a year ago - cancelled through sheer incompetence and deceit on their part. Something good came of it though - it prompted me to create a diagram that shows where TalkTalk appear on the customer service continuum: http://revs.org/blog/where-does-talktalk-appear-on-the-customer-service-continuum/

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Talktalk not bad for me

      However I had a nightmare trying to sort out the Old Man's broadband with BT. It had a stuck B-RAS profile of 500kbps. After 4 engineers visits, insistence there was nothing wrong at the exchange (less than a mile away) and multiple calls dealing with call centre numpities eventually they said oh it's an exchange fault. This took 4 weeks to resolve. Grrrrrrrr

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Was down in Nottingham

    back now though.

  4. Rabbit80

    Ours was down for about an hour. Back up now and working fine. Annoyed by the fact BT couldn't be arsed to answer their support line. In Harrogate

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    12 sites down

    I think we realised that BT had a problem before they did ...

    12 sites down, 5 sites up ...

    for once in their lives Demon Internet were not the ones that were taking us out.

    1. Powelly
      Meh

      Re: 12 sites down

      I've always found Demon really reliable for me. It's been down once in the five years since we've been a customer. That was an epic 5 day outage that included our voice line for the first 2 days and was about a fortnight before my wife was due to give birth. In that case a BT Engineer had been working in the cabinet 20 yards down the road just before it went down, but you'd be a fool and a charlatan to think it was related - complete coincidence according to Openreach!

      We're looking at moving from Demon, but that's purely down to their frankly ridiculous FUP, which chops your speeds to 128K, but gives you no option to pay for extra when you use over 50GB per 30 days.

      1. dak

        Re: 12 sites down

        That was why I left them a month ago after 15 years(!). What made it worse was that their tech support told me that the data slurping was due to TV downloads when in fact we had a mail client continually refreshing its database.

        With Plusnet now. Dumped BT at the same time. An easy change over, and the broadband is seven times faster.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: 12 sites down

          Not really dumped BT have you? given that Plusnet is a subsiduary of BT, though have to admit I am thinking of using them, 'cos at least thir FUP and shaping are published, rather than BT's hidden in the web equivilent of downstairs in a filing cabinet behind a door with a sign that mentions leopards.

          Are Plusnet any good?

          1. Hyphen

            Re: 12 sites down

            "Are Plusnet any good?"

            I share a bus with half their CS workforce every morning (based in Sheffield); from observation they seem fairly clued up guys.

            Not had reason to use them though.

          2. D@v3

            Re: 12 sites down

            Was with plusnet, moved to o2. Better prices, better speeds, better FUP (on 'the works' use as much as you like, when you like, there may be a limit, but I haven't found it yet.)

      2. Vic

        Re: 12 sites down

        > I've always found Demon really reliable for me.

        They're a pain when there's a problem, though.

        I had a customer with a Demon connection. It had failed, and I had to get it sorted pronto.

        Their "help" line looked at the account, and proclaimed "Oh, that's a business account. I'm not trained to do Business support".

        Three times they cut me off before I got someone who would actually look at it.

        Vic.

  6. I think so I am?
    Trollface

    Roma'

    Maybe the scrap value of glass is on the up!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wobble in Essex

    Our 3 lines at the office were OK, but my home Infinity went down for a while, but it's back now.

  8. richard 7

    Portsmouth

    Waterlooville, Cosham and Central exchanges are/were affected. Modems all showing Showtime but CHAP authentication is being thrown back, bizarrley I can see the authentication going through then the process restarts and throws the firewall for a loop as it was told the login was ok.

    BT Broadband customers are popping back up onto our radar but no Infinity users have come back up yet.

  9. Alex-L
    Unhappy

    I don't mind the outages. I mind the speed being less than half a percent of what we pay for!

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    multiple lines down nationwide

    We had multiple sites across the country down, however not every line we had with them.

    was down for about 45mins then all sites back up again at the same time.

    Looked like a Primary Radius server fault and as "richard 7" mentioned Chap was timing out then we were given a private IP - suspiciously similar to the test ip BT give out for BT_test user accounts.

    1. SImon Hobson Bronze badge

      Re: multiple lines down nationwide

      Yes, it most definitely wasn't restricted to London, or even South - we had two customers in the North West go down.

      I have out of band access to one site, and yes, I saw the private addressing as well.

      It gets interesting when you use automated monitoring to watch customer connections - you just wouldn't believe how many are taken down, and how frequently, by routine work in the early hours of the morning.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: multiple lines down nationwide

        "It gets interesting when you use automated monitoring to watch customer connections - you just wouldn't believe how many are taken down, and how frequently, by routine work in the early hours of the morning."

        And when would you expect this necessary routine work takle place? Noon?

        Wow, honestly, the general public's reaction to outages is just extreme.

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
          FAIL

          Re: multiple lines down nationwide

          "And when would you expect this necessary routine work takle place? Noon?"

          I think he was suggesting that "routine" work not expected to affect users is cocked up more often than one might expect and subsequently causing unexpected, non-routine outages.

          1. pacmantoo

            Re: multiple lines down nationwide

            So some PFY typo'd 1pm instead of 1am. Hence the 24hr clock!

    2. pacmantoo
      FAIL

      Re: multiple lines down nationwide

      Ditto for us. Just like to tell BT that Swansea ISN'T anywhare near London - but then if they couldn't check on google maps...

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: multiple lines down nationwide

      I submit our branch office in freaking Ayr as candidate for northenmost affected site. IT manager drove all the way there to have it stumble back to life shortly before his arrival.

  11. Tom 38

    Irony

    People bitching on the internet about their internet being down.

    Also, I love the new "man in the street" approach seen on el reg and other sites: When a story breaks, find some "Outraged of Tunbridge Wells" on Twitter, post a screenshot of them #moaning #their #asses #off.

    1. richard 7
      Thumb Up

      Re: Irony

      Thats because I have 'failover to GPRS' on the firewall :P

      1. Lee Dowling Silver badge

        Re: Irony

        We're a school with 380 pupils, we have 2 BT lines here, both were knocked out simultaneously (as in, died before Linux could spot a dead route). So our load balancing / failover of them didn't help any (I know it's not proper failover because it's the same exchange but one line is usually always up when the other is down - and, yes, strange disconnects at 5-to-9 and 6 am aren't unusual at all, so much so I have text-control of the ADSL router's power so I can reboot them remotely if we need to VPN in).

        Fortunately, we have experience of this (despite being so close to the exchange, I could lend them some Ethernet cable and get a better connection) so we have the same 3G stick that provides the SMS text reception also stuck into the Linux server permanently and failover to it manually when we want to. Costs us about £2 for the day on T-Mobile or whatever but works good enough to run a school off with appropriate caching and certainly better than nothing.

        We also saw the 172.0.0.0 subnet address and the usual junk (i.e. getting the right IP but can't do anything with it in some kind of "dead" session, etc. - hence why we have the remote-power-cycle system in the first place).

        But BT service status said "next time for resolution: 15:00" at one point so I didn't wait for them to try to resolve it. Seems to be fixed now, but my boss here just moved locally and he has the same problems constantly with BT too.

        Weirdly, on PlusNet, I never had an outage in nearly 10 years, and certainly never for longer than a router-reboot, and didn't get these kind of constant disconnects (lucky if we get 48 hours before one of the two routers needs to be kicked again) or false IP's when it did come back up (wonder how many home users are still running on a 172 address that doesn't route now and will be until they reboot their router?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Irony

          "We also saw the 172.0.0.0 subnet address "

          Remeber private addresses would be between 172.16.0.0 172.32.0.0. A 172.0.0.0 address is public and addressable.

          1. Lee Dowling Silver badge

            Re: Irony

            It was in the reserved local subnets, yes. But more importantly, it wasn't our assigned static IP so I spotted it because of that, if nothing else!

  12. NellyD
    Headmaster

    Hubs?

    "...we are advising customers to reboot their hubs...". Leave your firewalls well alone and just power cycle your hubs? That'll work!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      Re: Hubs?

      Yes the BT Homehub, you may of seen it advertised for the last x bloody years.

      1. NellyD

        Re: Hubs?

        You saw the pedant icon and know what a proper hub is?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          FAIL

          Re: Hubs?

          Yes, it's the centre of something, such as a wheel or propeller, or maybe the central focal point of a some sort of activity.

          1. NellyD

            Re: Hubs?

            Good. Now pop in to the nearest PC world, ask them for a hub and then try getting it to connect to the internet.

            In the 10+ years we had our BT connection it's always been Cisco kit they've supplied. Had they ever phoned us up and said to "reboot our hub" we'd have ditched them a damn site sooner than we did.

            *Burns pedant hat*

            1. Anthony Hegedus Silver badge
              Boffin

              Re: Hubs?

              Actually if you went to your nearest PC world and asked for a hub, they'd probably sell you a router, after first ensuring it's got a DSL modem if you're using Virgin Cable or Satellite, or just a regular ethernet WAN port if you use ADSL. Except they'd call it a DSL router if it was actually the one for Cable broadband.

              Actually, they'd probably sell you a Norton antivirus at only half the double normal price. And a USB cable that costs £40.

              In point of face, there's (probably) no such thing as a network hub any more. About 15 years ago they got replaced by proper network switches. A network hub allows for all the bandwidth (say 10Mbit/s) to be shared with all the ports, thus creating a massive slowdown when people actually start working. A network switch allows for much greater bandwidth as it switches traffic between relevant ports almost as fast as the circuit allows (10/100/1000Mbit/s). A switch and a hub effectively do the same thing from and end user point of view. So a switch is like a sort of... hub... I suppose.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Hubs?

        "Yes the BT Homehub, you may of seen it advertised for the last x bloody years."

        May *have*, ARGH.

  13. Alister

    "In and around London"

    That must be a very broad definition, here in Derbyshire, out of four sites on BT business Broadband two went down, two stayed up, even though they are all connected to the same exchange. Very peculiar...

    Those two that were down, had a full ADSL session, and a PPP session, and had IP's assigned, they just weren't passing traffic.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "In and around London"

      It is a fail.

      They should of used standard geographic terms. The correct method is "London" and "Outside London".

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "In and around London"

        Should *have*, sheesh :D

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        A clue for Lost all faith

        Nobody says "should of", they and you say "should uv". That should remind you why we spell it "should've".

        See also: must've, could've, might've, I've, etc.

  14. Foose
    FAIL

    In and around London they say I did not know that Newcastle had been moved !!! seeing as Companies around that area were out as well...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      When you're Moon People(tm) like BT, Newcastle does seem pretty close to London, anyway...

  15. Enverex
    WTF?

    Also Worcester it seems...

    Starting getting random behaviour on FTTC line around midnight last night (connection would work for around 3MB worth of traffic and then just stop, but still believing it's sync'ed and connected).

    My home network appears to have disappeared entirely around 12:20 (pm) today now.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    That's...

    ... why I prefer to have two different ISPs on my load balancing/fail-over type router thingy.

  17. Piloti
    Meh

    Huawei

    One does wonder how much of this is down the "value offering" from Huawei that BT purchased ?

  18. Annihilator

    Irony-o-meter

    Twitter user angry at BT's suggestion to check online still manages to tweet. Misplaced anger perhaps?

    Also worth checking the irate sense of injustice of seemingly expecting a five 9's level of service but paying peanuts.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: Irony-o-meter

      Have Twitter removed the ability to twit by sending an SMS text message then? You know, that clever system Twitter is founded on.

      1. Annihilator
        FAIL

        Re: Irony-o-meter

        "via Twitter for iPhone" but thanks for playing...

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Irony-o-meter

          My apologies. I thought only BT was down. I didn't realise that whinging via Twitter about one provider via another wasn't allowed.

  19. batfastad

    BT

    You're with BT... Get used to it. You'd have to pay us to go back there.

  20. Andy Livingstone

    What's in a name?

    When it is BT it is an "outage" and a headline story. Three simply call it "Maintenance".

  21. Peter Revell

    Taking the piss out of TalkTalk

    I know this fashionable, but I have been a very satisfied user of Tiscali since April 2006 and the only incident I had early on was dead slow downloads which were due to 'faulty protocols' installed by my previous ISP - Plusnet! The Tiscali engineer located them where Plusnet had failed on several occasions. I get 3.6 - 3.7 Meg regularly which I am happy with for copper wire buried without protection in chalk marl/clay soil for 44 years. Good old GPO!

  22. James Hayes
    FAIL

    Don't bother calling support...

    ...you'll likely end up speaking to the guy i dealt with yesterday - although that was about a failed order. To say he had "limited" information at his disposal is an understatement.

    The chat transcript is quite amusing for anyone who has any experience of tech support lines: http://www.hitcl.com/2012/07/bt-below-terrible/ if you want to take a look.

  23. Sirius Lee

    Get it in perspective

    My BT connection stopped working at 12:46 yesterday and resumed again at 13:31. 45 minutes over lunch time. And probably only the 3rd time I've noticed in 5 years. Nothing is perfect and is absolutely nothing compared to my experience with VM.

  24. Just a geek
    Unhappy

    Had an outage in Maidstone a few weeks back - one that was never listed on BT really crap status page and often in the evenings the system creaks to a halt. Maybe time for a new vendor as it seems that BT isn't keeping pace with the requirements of the users?

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