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ADSL restored to UK
Broadband Britain splutters back to life
A major network incident that wiped out much of the UK's ADSL and unmetered dial-up Internet services earlier today has been fixed.
Things should be improving throughout the afternoon and into the evening, although pockets of users could still experience difficulties getting online.
BT says that its Colossus IP network crashed at around 10.00am this morning cutting off tens of thousands of ADSL customers, although some Register readers say they experienced problems as early as 9.00am.
An unknown number of users of unmetered dial-up services was also affected as Surftime and FRIACO-based services were reportedly hit.
The true scale of the problem - described as a "major network failure" by BT engineers - will probably never be known.
BT says the problem was fixed within around two-and-a-half hours, although it takes longer to right itself through the system, following an outage of this scale. The telco has apologised for the outage and is currently investigating what went wrong.
Earlier today a BT spokeswoman said that the telco had "lost part of its Colossus IP backbone" network.
Thankfully, it appears they've now found it again.
The Register has received reports from people from all over the country saying how they're regaining access to the Net.
Many though are unhappy at the lack of information about the outage - they say they were left in the dark.
BT was inundated with calls jamming helpdesk phone lines and forcing some irate customers to phone BT's London HQ in search of answers. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
