BT outage: second day of service issues for underfire firm

Not great timing for firm in week it was slammed by MPs

BT's network is suffering a second day of faults, leaving scores of customers without access to the internet.

BT acknowledged the problems on Twitter, apologising for the outages.

The firm also put an update on its status page acknowledging the problems, although did not give a specific reason for the issue, 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 3rd parties or cable theft."

The latest problems come a day after issues on Wednesday that affected not only BT customers but Plusnet subscribers as well.

The company has blamed "power issues" for the outage. In a statement, it said: "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, and by 9.30am the telco's website listed a large number of local phone number codes that were experiencing problems.

Many of the faults carried on through the morning. Telecity Group's co-location centre in London's Docklands was singled out 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 only yesterday 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 overlooked 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 Computing 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 since replaced Vaizey.