Britain's broadband ADSL service was plunged into darkness this morning following a catastrophic failure of BT's network.

Details are still sketchy but it's understood that nearly all ADSL connections across the country are down - including those provided by service providers other than BT - along with some unmetered dial-up services.

The Register has received reports from readers that some services have been unaffected by the incident.

Unconfirmed reports claim that BT's Web site, BT.com, was also floored by the outage, although this is now up and running again.

According to a BT spokeswoman, the company has "lost part of its Colossus IP backbone" network.

Early reports suggest the network crashed sometime before 10.00am (GMT). BT engineers are busy trying to fix the problem as quickly as possible, we're told. ®