Telewest's blueyonder Internet service is experiencing problems following a planned network upgrade last night.

Punters in and around Gateshead and Gillingham are facing intermittent problems after routers went down in these areas.

However, the work overran causing the cableco to warn its customers that it was suffering a "national outage".

A message on blueyonder's status page this morning said: "Please be advised there is currently a national outage which may result in users having either a loss of connectivity or connection problems."

An update posted at 9.06am added: "Our engineers are currently working on this issue and hope to have a full resolution within the hour. The majority of regions have all been resolved however there are currently certain areas that will still be experiencing issues on both HSI (High Speed Internet) and Dial-Up."

A spokeswoman for Telewest said most broadband punters were back online by 7.30am.

Blueyonder has 150,000 broadband users and more than 300,000 dial-up customers. ®