April 1 ADSL outage hits ISPs and users

Part of BT's ADSL network was knocked out last night causing disruption to thousands of Net users in the UK.

According to BT Wholesale, some 30 ISPs, including AOL UK, Freeserve and Pipex, were hit following a sizeable outage in the Ilford, Essex area.

BT reckons the problems were isolated to London and the South East and reports that only around 13,000 end users were affected.

But this has been disputed by some ISPs. AOL UK confirmed that several thousand of its customers were hit, while Pipex said that the outage downed more than 20,000 of its users.

The Register is also aware that the entire customer base of one smaller ISP also lost their ADSL connections following last night's outage.

The incident began around 20.30BST last night and lasted for around two hours. Although the problem was resolved last night some ISPs reported this morning that they were still trying to get customers back online.

One ISP described last night's bother as the "worst outage for a while". Another was angry that they first heard about the outage from customers, rather than BT. ®

* Reports have come in that punters in Bournemouth, Carlisle, Leeds and Warrington were also hit by yesterday's bother. Which suggests adds weight to the idea that some ISPs were affected nationwide by yesterday's problem.