Yesterday: Openreach boss quits. Today: BT network goes TITSUP

Updated Less than 24 hours after BT Openreach chief Joe Garner quit the telco's troubled infrastructure division, BT customers all over the UK are saying they can't get online – with the apparent network outage possibly taking up to three days to fix.

The outage manifested as a packet routing problem, with some unfortunate souls reporting 100 per cent packet loss to various IP addresses – thus ruling out a DNS snafu.

BT used its official customer care Twitter account this morning to admit to problems in the south east, East Anglia and the East Midlands. No timescales were given on Twitter for any fixes.

Meanwhile, the company's service status page listed a handful of small towns scattered across the UK as being affected. El Reg has seen angry customers from towns not on that list tweeting at the telco asking what's going on – but none appear to have realised that the outage may take up to three days to be fixed.

BT's service status page seemed to indicate the outage would take up to three days to fix in some areas

More techie-minded customers began doing some diagnostics of their own.

As traditionally happens during an outage, everyone immediately grabbed their mobile phones and started tweeting at the one-time state monopoly telco.

@petehotchkiss yes lots of complains about on twitter.. and as got home hub can't change dns servers..grrr! :S

— Nate Smith (@natesmith__) November 17, 2015

@BTCare I can't access any websites, basically no internet connection. Always helpful when trying to do uni work!!! Ever since 9. Help.

— Nathan Lurkins (@NJLurkins) November 16, 2015

Yesterday saw BT Openreach boss Joe Garner leave the telco's infrastructure division after about 18 months in post to take the CEO spot at the Nationwide building society. He was previously the head of HSBC's UK office. There has been absolutely no suggestion he took the router config data with him when he left the building. ®

Update

Since the publication of this story, BT has been in touch to say: “BT would like to apologise to customers in the South East of England and East Anglia who had issues loading web pages this morning. We fixed the problem by lunchtime and customers have been back online since then.”