UK Edition
BT down: broadband internet service suffers second day of outages
BT’s broadband service suffered outages for a second day in a row on Thursday, causing widespread disruption amongst internet users.
The company reported a power failure at Telehouse North, a connection run by a separate company at London's docklands, and said it had fixed the problem later in the afternoon..
The outage is also believed to have affected other internet providers, although the website Down Detector, which tracks outages, reported a large number of BT internet users seeing problems.
"We apologise to those BT customers who had problems connecting to some internet services this morning. Internet usage is now back to normal for consumer and small business customers. A small number of larger businesses may still be experiencing some limited internet access. Engineers should have these fixed soon," BT said.
"The issue, which affected BT and other providers, was due to Telehouse North, one of our internet connection partners in the docklands, suffering power issues. The issue affected less than five percent of our customers’ internet usage, and BT took immediate action to minimise these issues by redirecting traffic."
What happened?
The power outage was at a data centre and internet peering site run by Telehouse North in East London, is the second in two days that has disrupted internet users. Peering essentially allows internet traffic to flow between different networks, so if a site is down, users have trouble accessing certain websites on other networks.
A spokesman for Telehouse said: "We are aware that there has been an issue with the tripping of a circuit breaker within Telehouse North that has affected a specific and limited group of customers within the building. The problem has been investigated and the solution identified. Our engineers are working with our customers on the resolution right now. We will release updates in due course."
On Wednesday, services were down for several hours affecting thousands of internet users and BT said the issue had affected 10 per cent of internet usage.
The outage also affected banks operating in the area. HSBC's banking service also appeared to be seeing problems on Thursday, although it is unclear if it is related.
The service stops people accessing some websites, rather than their entire internet connection.