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BT at last coughs to 'major outage' after broadband went titsup across UK on Sat
Customers left fuming at the weekend
BT was hit by a huge DNS outage on Saturday morning but the telecoms giant was very slow to respond to customer complaints, it has been claimed.
A DNS flaw downed BT's network across Blighty, according to anecdotal reports on Twitter.
But the one-time state monopoly was very sluggish to respond to gripes from subscribers who were unable to connect to the internet via BT's broadband service for several hours over the weekend.
BT told The Register in a brief statement:
We can confirm some customers had issues connecting to the internet on Saturday morning. The issue was fixed within a couple of hours and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.
But BT declined to comment on how widepread the outage had been for its 7 million-strong broadband customerbase.
BT's DNS server seems to be unwell. Just had to switch over to Google's name servers before half the sites would load. :/
— Darrielle Skyblaze (@blazingskies) June 28, 2014
DNS issues with BT it appears. Half the internet is unavailable, ironically including BT's service status page...
— Daniel Phillips (@kinboshi) June 28, 2014
Bt's DNS servers are down, but bt's status pages are garbage so you won't see them acknowledging it
— Jo Shields (@directhex) June 28, 2014
BT customers began hammering the company's @BTcare Twitter account early on Saturday morning, but it didn't reply until just before midday - only after the technical blunder had been fixed.
It said: "Sorry about the issues many of you had accessing the Internet this morning. Problem is now fixed- sorry for any trouble caused."
See … the whole DNS service of BT goes down for 12 hours and their technical help wants to blame my equipment! I KNOW HOW THE INTERNET WORKS
— John Spiers (@squeezyjohn) June 28, 2014
Once BT had brought its status page back to life, the company coughed to a "major broadband problem." ®
Updated to add
This neat graph shows the extent of the outage, according to network activity monitored by BGPMon.
Large outage & traffic drop for BT this weekend. AS2856 (BTnet UK Regional network) lost 67% of its prefixes for ~2hr pic.twitter.com/HKz6Ioq2hV
— BGPmon.net (@bgpmon) June 30, 2014