Some 70,000 DSL users in the North West of England and the Midlands lost their broadband connection over the weekend following a hardware failure at a key BT location in Manchester.

The incident occurred at around 9.00am on Saturday morning when BT Wholesale - which serves scores of ISPs - suffered a "control card failure" at its Manchester ATM Node 5.

BT Wholesale said that around ten per cent of the half a million broadband customers connected to the Manchester site were hit by the glitch.

Reports that engineers from Marconi were being flown in from Canada to fix the problem were a "red herring", said a BT Wholesale spokesman.

Service was restored at around 4.30pm on Sunday afternoon, said BT.

Commenting on this weekend's outage, one reader told us: "It's not the first time BT have let us down on a weekend. Still, we're only Northerners. ®

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