NEWS Tens of thousands of businesses with a BT broadband connection were knocked offline on Friday when BT's network suffered a major crash.
The outage occurred at 12.30pm on Friday, and prevented 70,000 firms across the UK from accessing the internet. A BT spokesman said that by 4pm around two-thirds had been reconnected, with over 20,000 customers still waiting for their connectivity to be restored at the time of writing.
Dial-up internet users were also hit, but they should only have experienced a temporary connection failure.
The crash occurred in a network switching centre at Bletchley, near Milton Keynes, at one of several sites that handles internet traffic for BT Retail.
According to BT, the firms affected were those that happened to be connected through the Bletchley facility rather than another part of BT's infrastructure at the time of the crash.
Graeme Wearden writes for ZDNet UK.
Comments
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1. James Brisland
Dear All,
My company was affected but this outage. At around 12:30pm our office internet connection went down.
At first I thought it may have been a router problem, so I reset it. After about 30 minutes of pulling my hair out I decided to ring BT. BIG ERROR!
After about an hour of trying to find the correct phone number and being passed around several departments, and after being cut off once after holding for Tech Support for 20 minutes I begain to get really frustrated.
As you can imagin my boss is also getting quite pissed off by now and I'm receaving quite a pasting from him about pissing around trying to contact BT and after some f'ing and blinding I finaly got hold of Tech Support.
So almost 2 hours have passed after the outage and I'm talking to someone on the phone. Well firstly we go through the various unplug the router for three minutes, make sure your username and password is correct, the usual BS which I had already tried. Then he asks me what router I have, I tell him I've got a DLink DSL-504. He then says that they don't support D-Link routers and give me the D-Link phone number. I'm starting to get confused and even more frustrated at this point, trying to say that nothing has ever gone wrong before and there is no reason it should be a router problem as it seems to be functing fine (by the way I still at this point havn't been told about the outage and at no point did he say there was a problem with the network) anyway I'm listening to the Tech guy talking away, and mid scentence the line goes dead. WTF? HE CUT ME OFF! I'm really pissed off now!
Anyway I now start to wonder why the hell it took so long to get through to Tech Support and see the ADSL Status line telephone number next to me. I phone the status line and it says it was updated at 2pm on Friday 14th.. blah blah.. there is a network issue affecting some of our business customers... OK I think to myself. So there is a problem. No I'm fine with this but the point is at no time during my 40/50 minute conversation with the Tech Support guy did he mention this problem, and to cap it all off he hung up on me!!!
Anyway I got no work done all day (I failed to mention that we are a website development company and I was in the middle of working on one of our live sites, www.miltonkeynes.com uploading a new code base, which luckly I was uploading to a test area otherwise the site would have come down as I was cut off mid upload)
In conclusion... BT - ARSE!
Thats my rant for the day.
James Brisland
Zero-Now Ltd
2. Cristian Nicola
You are lucky to ever had internet at all :D
I moved into a new flat about 3 months ago and one the first things i've discovered is that the phone line was not working - ever since i've been visited by so many "engineers" from bt that i lost track of count, yet the phone is still dead. Last visit was on 14th, and they do not know what is going on - promissed they will get back to me, yet never heard from them.
In conclusion - great service BT!
3. John Dady
I was connected to broadband last Thursday and suffered no interruption. Also the BT engineer who called to take away my Home Highway called on the due day at the due time and was most helpful. Excellent service once again from BT. And no I don't work for them and I live in the back of beyond halfway up a mountain.
4. anonymous
I'm surprised you haven't mentioned the recent problems with BT's Online Billing system. I signed up for paperless billing in October...but when I went to access my bill details in December, the system didn't recognise my log-in. 5 calls to BT, nearly an hour on hold in total and I was told that the supplier had not migrated my details into the upgrade -- and there were quite a few customers with the same problem. I had to have a new username and the upgraded system still has some teething problems. So I switched back to paper bills!
5. anonymous
koyabe, check this out