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Updated Online banking service Egg.com is currently unavailable to its customers and the firm is pointing the finger of blame at telecoms provider Cable and Wireless (C&W).

Many users have contacted The Register to complain that the service has been down since 7pm yesterday evening, indeed a visit to the website throws up a "server not found" status page.

Unhelpfully for their customers the firm has no idea when service will be resumed and apparently no back-up system.

A spokeswoman said: "We're at a priority level and in the meantime customers can still access the service by phoning the normal Egg number."

She added that, while Egg accepts that the situation is "very frustrating" for its users, the service depends on C&W providing a fix.

Egg was not the only company to have been hit by the problems, said the spokeswoman, and she claimed that up to 50 other UK C&W business customers were also in a spot of server downtime bother today.

One unhappy user told us: "I've been trying to get onto Egg all morning with no success. Eventually managed to get through and they told me that C&W has a major fault which has knocked Egg (and allegedly 46 other major sites) offline."

El Reg has put a call in to C&W to find out what's going on, which other firm's are potentially impacted and how long before service comes back to life.

We'll keep you posted.

Update

C&W confirmed that it has been having ongoing network problems that has hit a "handful" of its customers for the past 24 hours, however it was unable to estimate when the system would be back online.

It said:

"Since yesterday afternoon, we've been experiencing some issues on our network meaning that a handful of our customers are experiencing intermittent, slow or no access to their Internet and email services.

Delivering excellent service to our customers is our number priority. As such, while we isolate and fix the root cause of the issue, we're putting in re-routes for ourcustomers to take them away from the fault and restore their services.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused to our customers and will be keeping them up to date with our progress at regular intervals."

Meanwhile, given that Egg apparently has no alternative telecoms system in place, its website continues to be unavailable to users.

One Reg reader contacted us and said: "I work for a company that has too also been hit by the C&W issue. I prised out of one of their techies that they have Cisco in as it's a major BGP issue.

"They also lost one of their DNS servers which didn't help matters. Wolworths and Wolseley were also hit by this along with 15 major customers. They have fixed the issue rerouting large customers whose account managers shouted the loudest that theirs were the most important." ®

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