UK internet throws a wobbly

Several major corporate websites in the UK and parts of Microsoft’s MSN service and Hotmail have been down today.

A spokeswoman for Natwest said: “Yes, we’ve been having DNS (domain name server) problems today which have stopped access to the website. We’re still working on fixing the problem.”

Sky.com, skybroadband.com and Telstra Europe were also affected.

A spokeswoman for Sky blamed the problems on PSINet – the backbone provider bought by Telstra Europe. PSINet was unable to comment when we called them.

The Internet Traffic Report showed an outage at BT's Ilford core router.

A spokesman for BT said he was not aware of any major network problems today.®